


My Love is as a Fever

by Bishopsbird



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Brainwashing, Emotional Manipulation, Headaches & Migraines, Illnesses, M/M, Medical Kink, Mind Games, Possessive Behavior, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Sickfic, Vomiting, dark!Sherlock, weight loss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-07
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2017-12-07 19:32:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bishopsbird/pseuds/Bishopsbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Muchausen syndrome by proxy is defined as a form of abuse in which the perpetrator induces real or apparent illness in the victim in order to assume the role of the heroic caregiver. </p><p>As applied to Sherlock’s behaviour, this definition is not correct. Sherlock doesn’t believe in heroes, and he doesn’t care about anyone but himself.</p><p>Sherlock makes John sick because he wants to keep John all for himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When John gets sick on Saturday, it’s not an accident.

The illness begins with a light headedness, and processes quickly to chills and fever. Soon John is pulling on his jumper, and turning up the heat in the flat, complaining about the bad insulation of the windows.

Sherlock ignores this behaviour, or gives John the impression that he does at any rate. It would be out of character for him to be solicitous of a sick flatmate, and Sherlock doesn’t want to do anything to arouse John’s suspicions.

Sherlock can’t help but listen when John throws up in the bathroom. Sherlock should be repulsed to hear John vomiting up everything he ate for dinner, but he’s not. Sherlock doesn’t plan on John ever being well enough to eat so much again, and so the sound of him throwing up a full meal is precious and rare, something to be savored. With any luck, it won’t be repeated.

When John gets out of the bathroom, his face is red and flushed, beads of sweat on his forehead. John’s sprayed air freshener, and it’s almost enough to cover the scent of his sickness.

“Were you listening at the door?” John asks. He’s more incredulous than angry.

“No,” Sherlock says.

“You were.” John appears confused by Sherlock’s odd behavior, but living with a man who keeps body parts in the fridge and drags him to the morgue on a regular basis has inured him to most of Sherlock’s strangeness, and Sherlock can see John determine it's not worth making a big deal about his odd behavior. “I’m going to bed; I don’t feel well.”

“I can see that.”

“Yeah, brilliant deduction, that,” John says; illness has made him snarky.

Sherlock gives him a look.

John starts to head in the direction of his bedroom, then, throwing his head over his shoulder, adds to Sherlock, “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you. Don’t want you to get sick too.”

“No,” Sherlock says quietly, warmed by John’s concern for him. There’s no chance that he will get sick, but it’s nice to know that John cares.

Later, John is sleeping, his rest uneasy and uncomfortable—Sherlock can hear him twisting and turning in his bed—and Sherlock is stretched out in his customary supine position on the couch. Presently his phone beeps.

Sherlock picks it up. The screen reads simply: _This will end badly._

Mycroft.

Sherlock sighs. He deletes the text, and returns the phone to his pocket.

Mycroft is wrong.

This will not end badly. Sherlock is in control and knows precisely what he is doing. Things will end exactly as he means them to. 


	2. Chapter 2

On Sunday, John is somewhat better. During the morning, he manages to eat a light breakfast without throwing up, but as the day processes he begins to feel worse. He takes his temperature, and finding that he has a low-grade fever, diagnoses himself with the flu. John self-medicates with some pills he keeps in the medical cabinet.

Pleased to see things progressing so well, Sherlock decides John can be left alone for a bit, so he goes to morgue to watch Molly perform an autopsy.

“Get biscuits,” John’s voice calls out. He’s gone to his room for a bit of a lie down. “And we’re out of milk again.”

Cookies and milk. When John is sick, he seeks the favorite foods of childhood.

How touching.

 

When Sherlock comes home, John is still asleep, twisted up in his sheet. The sheen of sweat glistens on his brow.

John wakes up a few hours later and declares himself well enough for a real dinner. They get take away from the Chinese place, and by the time the food has arrived it’s clear from the way John nervously eyes the fried rice that he is feeling nauseous again.

John eats lightly, but he still manages to consume more than Sherlock, who puts his chopsticks down on his plate. Instead of eating, Sherlock feeds himself by watching John’s flushed face, the film of pain clouding his eyes, and the sweat matting the hair at the nap of his neck.

John has a beautiful neck. His skin is soft, and pale, and delicate.  

The visible manifestations of John’s illness awake a greedy hunger in Sherlock for more, but as much as he’d like to see John’s illness progress more quickly, Sherlock knows that moving too fast would be unwise. It’s like a courtship, delicate and precise: Sherlock knows that slow and careful will bring him better results than fast and sloppy.

He doesn’t want to hurt John, after all.

Later that night, John throws up again. He calls up Sarah, leaving a message on her mobile that he’s feeling sick and won’t be able to come into work the next morning.

This annoys Sherlock.

He hadn’t planned for John to get so sick again tonight, and the fact that John did so means that Sherlock’s been perhaps a bit over enthusiastic with John’s medicine. John has a strong constitution, tempered by his conditioning in the war and running around with Sherlock over London, but he’s not a large man, and starting him off with the full dose might have been a bit much. 

The sounds of John in the bathroom, and his tossing and turning later in his bed are annoying both for their disruption to Sherlock’s evening and for the errors that they signify. 

Sherlock hates to make mistakes.

John’s inconvenient phone call to Sarah means that’s Sherlock has to postpone his plans for the rest of the week, recalibrate the doses in John’s medicine, and do lots of other dull and tedious things. Normally he’d assign as much of this grunt work to John, but that’s not possible this time, for the obvious reasons.

Sherlock would have liked to move on to the next stage of John’s illness straight away, but Sarah would notice if John vanishes after calling in sick. Sherlock will just have to be patient.

Sherlock is not good at being patient.

John spends Monday moping about the flat and generally getting in Sherlock’s way as he measures out the proper amounts of John’s medicine (“What’s the green powder for, Sherlock? Why do you need so much cleaning fluid? I hope you aren’t planning on storing any of that lead in the kitchen”) until Sherlock finally screams at him to shut up for heaven’s sake and go inflict his mindless chatter on someone else, and John goes to his room with a hurt look, carrying himself slowly as though walking pains him.

John is better by Tuesday, and goes into work, leaving Sherlock blessedly alone. It’s clear from both his manner and the way in which he interacts with Sherlock that John suspects nothing unnatural about his illness.

Sherlock waits until the weekend to resume John’s treatment, just to be safe.

Fortunately two teenage tourists are murdered in Piccadilly Circus on Tuesday. The media uproar, a chief investigator who is even more incompetent than usual, and a killer who likes to carve his confessions on his victim’s skin keep Sherlock occupied for the next couple of days, so that the wait under Saturday doesn’t feel as long as it might have.

On Saturday, John’s recovery takes a step back.

He’s well enough to be up and out of bed, but Sherlock can tell by his stiff movements and the way he avoids turning his neck too suddenly that it pains him.

John’s breakfast is just a slice of toast and some tea, because his stomach is bothering him again.

Sherlock walks into the kitchen behind John, feeling a thread of excitement wind its way through him as he notices how small John looks in his baggy trousers and oatmeal-coloured jumper. They’ve barely even started and already John looks fragile, weak, like Sherlock could pick him up and crush him without effort. He’s surprised by how much he likes this idea.

John’s lost two pounds in the last week. It’s not much; mostly water weight but it’s a good start.

“Stop it,” John says without turning around as he stands at the kitchen counter, spreading a layer of butter on his toast.

“Stop what?”

“You’re staring at me again. Stop it.”

“I’m not staring,” Sherlock says.

John finally puts down his toast and turns around to look at Sherlock. “Yes you are. I can feel it.”

Crinkling at the corners of John's eyes tells Sherlock that John still has a headache, which is perhaps why he is being so short with him. Sherlock hopes this rude stage passes quickly. He prefers the more tolerant version of John.

Sherlock returns John’s afforded gaze without blinking, keeping his face carefully composed.

“And you’re been weird all week,” John continues, not mollified in the slightest.

“Weird?” Sherlock’s curious to know what John means by this.

“Staring at me. More than usual, even. You kept doing it earlier this week, when I was ill. You seemed very—” John can’t find the right word (might Sherlock suggest enthralled? enraptured? enamored?) ….“Interested,” John concludes lamely.

Oh. Not good. The last thing Sherlock needs is John getting suspicious.

Sherlock gives John a careful smile, every millimeter of the expression honed to perfection.

A good smile is like a weapon, and this smile is one of his best. The smile is purposefully too wide, clumsy, like his face is a mask that Sherlock never learned how to properly use, but full of an honest desire to please. Sherlock thinks of it as his disarming smile, although John would probably describe it as endearing.

Either way, it has the intended effect: John’s expression softens as soon as Sherlock deploys it.

“A bit not good?” Sherlock says slowly, letting his voice waver just the proper amount. It’s almost unfairly easy: Sherlock knows how to play John almost better than his violin.

“A bit,” John says, completing their ritual. “Most people like to keep well away from someone else’s flu.” He tempers these words with a fond smile. “I know that you’re not most people though.”

Sherlock returns John’s half-apology with another of his disarming smiles, and earns a grin from John in return for his efforts.

God, but it’s dull, playing the part of the socially inept genius with the heart of gold. He doesn’t want to get John having misgivings about him now, though, not when he’s so close.

“I scarcely ever get ill,” Sherlock says. “And you know how I like gathering data for my experiments. Wouldn’t want to waste the chance.”

“I don’t want to know what type of experiment would involve ‘data’ you can gain watching me throw up,” John says, taking his plate of toast from the kitchen corner and bringing it to the table.

On the stove, the tea kettle is still humming away, the water almost boiled.

“You’re planning to go out this afternoon.”

John looks up from his paper, and chews, his mouth full of toast. Sherlock wasn’t asking him a question, but John takes it as one anyway, answering, “Yeah. Going to have a drink with Bill at the pub. How did you—”

“Text.”

John follows Sherlock’s gaze to where his phone is sitting on the edge of the table, an unread text from Bill visible on the screen.

John reaches out, and picks up the phone, bringing it closer to his plate. “Thanks for telling me he texted,” he says, mock-upset.

“Not your secretary.”

John makes a non-committal noise, and looks down at the screen. “Ha, very funny, ‘Mrs. Hudson’,” he says. John reads the text. Bill wants to meet at three instead of two thirty. The line between John’s brow is back. His head must be hurting him again.

“And you plan on going,” Sherlock says.

“Yeah,” John says, again treating Sherlock’s statement as an inquiry. He’s still looking down at his phone. “We’ve been meaning to meet up for ages. Already had to cancel twice.”

Sherlock already knows this, having been the cause of John’s cancellation both times. “You’ve still not feeling well.”

 “Since when do you believe in letting illness stop you from doing anything?”

“I’m not most people.”

“Funny,” John says again. He’s still looking down at his phone, typing out a reply to Bill.

It’s not funny.

John belongs here with Sherlock, not out having drinks with someone else. John should be giving his attention to Sherlock, not typing out a response on his phone to Bill.

There’s no point in getting upset, though. John is Sherlock’s already, and has been for some time. He just doesn’t know it yet.

The meeting with Bill can even be a boom, if Sherlock looks at it the right way. They’d already had John’s last supper. He hasn’t been able to eat a full meal for over a week, and now his toast is barely touched, John sitting stiffly in his chair as though his stomach is queasy again. Today can be his last non-Sherlock approved activity.

The only question: How to make sure it’s a proper send-off?

A piercing whistle screams through the flat.

“Kettle’s boiled,” John says playfully, just because he knows how it annoys Sherlock when he voices the obvious.

Before John can get up, Sherlock goes into the kitchen, and takes the kettle from the stove, pouring the boiled water into two tea cups.

One dose of the green powder and John wouldn’t be meeting Bill anywhere; he’d on the ground in half minute flat. One dose of blue powder, and John will experience the same reaction approximately six hours from now. Or of course, Sherlock can always do nothing.

Sherlock makes his choice.

Handing one of the cups to John, he sits down, and pulls a section of the paper toward himself. “Bill’s the one with the nose?”

John raises his cup to his lips, then stops to glare at Sherlock. “He listened to you talk about different types of radiators once for half an hour. You must remember him.”

Sherlock shrugs, and opens the paper.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sherlock watches hungrily as John takes a sip of his tea.

 “I remember,” Sherlock says slowly, still watching John as he takes another sip. He can see John’s Adam’s apple move as he shallows.  “Bill’s the one with the halitosis.”

“Honestly,” John says, setting his cup down on the table, “it’s a minor hygiene issue. Which he’s since fixed. Nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Sherlock says. Behind his newspaper, he lets his lips curve upward in a predatory grin that is nothing like the careful smile he gave John earlier. “I’m sure you’ll have a smashing time.”


	3. Chapter 3

When Sherlock was in school, he was sent to see a psychologist after a series of incidents which the school administration called disturbing and which Sherlock called educating idiots about when it’s time to shut up.

The psychologist had a book on abnormal psychology on her shelves, which Sherlock stole at their first and only meeting—the psychologist retired from the profession shortly after that, claiming unspecified personal issues—and paged through eagerly.

Sherlock had liked the neat categorizations of the different pathologies, and the way the book collected mental maladies as though they were butterflies that could be pinned behind glass and labeled. Two hundred and forty-three types of tobacco ash, five different varieties of personality disorders. The subjects didn’t matter; it was the act of categorization that Sherlock relished. 

But he hated the idea of anyone trying to do the same with his personality, because Sherlock has always been by nature undefinable.

The psychologist’s notes said that she thought Sherlock might be a psychopath, which was clearly wrong. 

 _Psychopaths_ , the book said in a section about these individuals’ abilities to mimic emotions but not understand them, _know the words but not the music._

This is not true about Sherlock, because he knows all the words, and he writes the music.

 

Sherlock plays the violin after John leaves for the pub—a mix of his own compositions and Liszt—and he’s so focused on the music that his phone rings twice before Sherlock notices.

It’s the vibration that finally catches his eye, a movement on the desk as the phone shakes with the sound of its ringing.

Sherlock puts down his violin, and picks up the phone.

On the other end: ragged breathing, then a static shifting sound as though the person on the other side has almost dropped his phone.

He waits.

“Sherlock? Sherlock?”

John’s voice is torn, breathless, rough and full of pain: Lovely.

Sherlock really needs to add an automatic recorder to his phone, because he would love to have that sound on repeat, something he can play again and again, savoring it. A piece of beauty in a world that’s otherwise unbearly dull and uninspired.

“Yes?” Sherlock says slowly, drawing out the sibilant S as though he’s tasting it.

“Sherlock, I think I’m….Sherlock, I just….can you….”

There’s a scuttling, scratchy sound, and then Bill comes on the line. “Sherlock, mate, are you there? Sherlock?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says again, coldly this time.

Sherlock is not anyone’s mate.

 “John’s not feeling well.” Bill’s voice is rough but upbeat, the worry in his tone unable to fully erase his customary boisterous cheer. Yes, Sherlock remembers: definitely the one with the halitosis. He can almost taste the man’s sweaty smell over the phone.

Sherlock, carefully disinterested as though Bill’s interrupted him in the midst of something important: “What’s wrong?”

“He threw up at the pub, and then started to go white all over. We’re sitting outside now, and I offered to ride in the cab with him so he can go back home but he keeps saying that he wants you. He’s really a bit out of it and—”

“Bill? Are you talking to him? Is he coming?” John, sounding a mix of confused and panicked.

“Put John on.”

“No, no, mate, he's not in a state to talk. He threw up on the pavement not five minutes ago. I can take him back to your flat, it’s not –”

Sherlock seethes with rage. John is his. If Sherlock wants any part of him, even his voice, he should have it immediately.

“No,” Sherlock says, “Stay where you are. I’ll come get him. Good bye.”

“I haven’t told you where the—”

Click as Sherlock ends the call, and Bill’s voice mercifully vanishes.

Idiot. As though Sherlock would let John go anywhere without he knowing where he was.

 

Sherlock doesn’t need the address; the GPS that Sherlock’s put on John’s phone tells him the information he needs.

Bill and John are sitting at a table outside the pub—the King’s Arms, how original--and the two of them look jagged and wrong sitting side by side like that. Sherlock belongs next to John, and seeing someone else in his place is as sharply piercing as though someone was grinding glass into his eyes.

Behind them, one of the staff is scrubbing up what appears to have been a pool of watery vomit.

The rest of the patrons are giving them both a wide berth.

John is shivering despite his heavy jumper, leaning against Bill for support. His eyes are glazed and unfocused, but when Sherlock appears in view he perks up a bit. John attempts to stand, but Bill stops this by pulling at John’s arm and bringing him back into his seat.

Unacceptable.  

Sherlock walks toward them, and some of the rage he’s feeling must be showing on his face, because Bill blanches, shifting in his seat until he's as far away from Sherlock as he can get without actually standing up.

Oops. Sherlock takes a step back, and schools his features into an expression that’s more appropriate for the eccentric genius whom Bill believes him to be: slightly annoyed at being drawn away from his work, distracted, distant.

“What’s going on?” he asks. Of course Sherlock can see everything that has occurred with a single glance, but he’s found that this type of question can be a good way to get a conversation started.

“I don’t know,” Bill says, giving John a worried look. “One minute he was fine and the next he was puking all over the floor.”

Charming. What a way with words Bill has.

“Fine,” Sherlock says, “I will take him.” 

“Are you sure? You’ve not in the middle of something important?” Bill asks with an eagerness that is entirely inappropriate for the situation. “One of your cases, maybe?”

“Franz Liszt,” Sherlock says shortly.

“Oh? Is the murder? Who’d he kill?”

Sherlock shoots him a withering look. “No one, I would imagine, considering that he died in 1886.”

“Oh.” Bill’s enthusiasm is dampened by this, but only a bit. He’s really a golden retriever of a person: all sweaty desire to please and panting curiosity. “I can help you take John back,” he says, rising from his seat, and putting a hand on John’s shoulder.

John is blinking slowly. He’s very pale and out of it enough that he doesn’t appear to realize that he’s the subject of their conversation.

“No.” Sherlock is careful to keep his face composed, but there’s not much more of this idiot that he can take, and if Bill doesn’t remove his hand from John’s shoulder soon things will not end well for any of them. “You have plans with your wife at five,” Sherlock says, “Wouldn’t want to be late. I will take him.”

Bill grins. “There! That trick of yours! Amazing! How did you know that?”

Dear God. What did Sherlock ever do to deserve this torment?

As if on cue, John coughs, and looks up at Sherlock, his eyes still gazed. “Sherlock? Why are you…”

Before he can say more, Sherlock sits down beside him in the seat vacated by Bill, forcing the other man to take a step back and remove his hand from John’s shoulder.

“It will be easier if I take him,” Sherlock says, and finally this is enough to get Bill to agree.

Of course there are some mindless pleasantries, first—Sherlock does his best to edit out Bill’s cheery “Feel better, mate” and John’s shaky reply— focusing instead on John besides him, at last close enough to touch.

After Bill’s gone, Sherlock pulls his chair closer to John’s, and lets John lean against him.

Sherlock’s not opposed to touching other people. He will do it if he needs to (it’s amazing how many Mrs. Hudson-like women can be won over with old-fashioned politeness and a few hugs) but he usually does so out of expediency and not personal desire. So Sherlock’s surprised by how nice this feels, just the two of them, with John’s body warm and comforting against his own.

“Why are you here?” John asks quietly.

“You called me,” Sherlock says.

“And you did what I asked?” John attempts a laugh, but ends up coughing instead, his body shaking against Sherlock’s. “Jesus, I must be sicker than I thought. Clearly I’m hallucinating.”

Sherlock wakes for the shaking to stop, then says, “Don’t talk. Just sit here.”

Sherlock was looking for intensity and not a long duration when he administered John’s dose this morning, and he is pleased to see John recover a bit as they sit at the table without speaking. Some of the colour returns to his face, and he rests less of his weight against Sherlock.

Sherlock waits a few more minutes, just to be safe, and then helps John up and leads them out to the street.

“I can walk fine by myself,” John says.

This is true, but only just; John wavers on his feet, barely remaining upright and steady.

John shouldn’t be allowed to contradict Sherlock like this (and it wouldn’t do if John cracked his head on the pavement) so Sherlock offers him support anyway, and is awarded when John leans on his proffered arm.

Hailing a taxi is not difficult, and John’s only a bit slower than usual as they tumble into the back. His colour is almost back to normal and his eyes are less glazed and unfocused.

John moves away from Sherlock once they’re ensconced in the back seat and the cab is on its way to Baker Street. Sherlock knows this is because John is worried that he’s not clean after vomiting, and also because he’s embarrassed that he called Sherlock to get him now that he’s feeling better, but it’s still difficult not to take the distance as an affront.

“I was right,” Sherlock says.

“Right about what?” John asks.

“You’ve more than validated my previous observation on the foolishness of undertaking social events when you are suffering from a physical infirmity,” Sherlock says.

John gives him a long-suffering look. “Saying ‘I told you so’ isn’t any more mature when you dress it up in fancy words,” he says.

 “I don’t see why you needed to have drinks with him at all,” Sherlock says. 

“Bill’s a friend,” John says.

“Friend! Why are you friends? You have nothing in common.”

John gives him another pointed look.

“We’re different,” Sherlock says.

John turns away from Sherlock to stare out the window.  The fact that John would think it’s acceptable to ignore Sherlock in this fashion—well, Sherlock takes a moment to breathe in deeply, cabining away the anger that seethes through him.

“Every time you go out with Bill, he begins by telling you about his job, which you find insufferably boring, so you pretend to listen and instead stare at the other people in the pub. Then, you start to tell him about your job, but even you realize that’s dull, so you tell him about my cases. But he’s already read your descriptions of them on your blog, and he’s already discussed whatever aspects of them he finds interesting with you via those moronic comments he leaves. So then you spend the rest of the meeting sitting talking about football and politics—which neither of you follow closely—before concluding the evening by saying what a fun time you’ve had, and shouldn’t we do this again soon.”

“Bill’s a friend,” John says again, as if this explains anything. Doesn’t John know that he’s not allowed to have friends except for Sherlock?

John’s still looking out the window.

“I don’t see what—”

John turns toward Sherlock, his face flushed with either fever or anger, Sherlock can’t tell which. “Jesus Christ, Sherlock, I go out with Bill two, maybe three times a year at most. He’s a friend. That’s what people do, in their normal lives, is go out with friends. Sometimes I just want to go out to a pub and talk about nothing, okay? It doesn’t have to be all corpses and crime scenes. ” John pauses to rub at his eyes, and clear his throat. “My head is pounding. I feel like shit. And you want to have some weird discussion about…I don’t even know what about. So let’s just not, okay?”

Anger, then.

Sherlock turns away from John, and doesn’t say another word to him for the entire cab ride.

 

Some people (Mycroft) say that Sherlock is unpredictable and unrestrained, and that he lacks the self-control to avoid giving in to his wilder impulses. This is completely untrue. Sherlock is in complete control, and he only acts upon the smallest sliver of his desires.

Case in point: when John exits the cab in front of him, Sherlock does not apply the pressure to the delicate veins at the nape of his neck that would cause John to crumple to the ground in a boneless heap of pain. Instead, Sherlock pays the cabbie and follows John up the stairs to 221B. Sherlock’s only indulgence of his rage is that he remains far enough behind on the stairs that John, still unsteady on his feet, can’t lean on Sherlock for support and is forced to clutch at the bannister.

Inside the flat, Sherlock ignores John completely, and sprawls out on the couch. He calls up the internal website of the Yard on his computer—it has a firewall, but to say it is a weak one would be a gross understatement—and looks through the most recent murder investigations. This is Sherlock’s equivalent of mindless comfort reading; the autopsy photos always calm him, and the sections where the police speculate on the identity of the killers are humor at its finest.

John comes out from his room several hours later. He studiously ignores Sherlock, going into the kitchen and making himself a snack.

Grilled cheese sandwich. From the sound of the knife cutting the bread, he’s using up the last of the rye he bought last week.

Two hours, then. Just enough time to research John’s new medicines.

Sherlock closes the murder files he’s looking at, and logs on to a different site, smiling as his screen fills with chemical formulas and recipes.

Two hours later to the minute, Sherlock hears John’s voice calling him from his bedroom.

Sherlock lets John call him two more times, before he gets up, closing his computer, and walks to John’s room.

Sherlock catches sight of himself in the mirror hanging on John’s wall and stops, savoring the sight: Sherlock, tall and imposing in the doorway, and John lying small and fragile in his bed, his face wan against the covers.

“Would you mind getting me a glass of water?”

John’s voice is quiet and hesitant, and Sherlock wonders how long he lay in bed, his throat scratchy and dry, debating with himself about whether to ask for help. His face is very pale again, the fever back in earnest.

“I would go myself, but I’m a bit dizzy and…” John trails off.

Sherlock regards John for a moment in silence, just to hammer home his power to refuse John his water by the simple expediency of ignoring him, and then goes into the kitchen.

When Sherlock returns, John takes two pills from the bottle of acetaminophen on his nightstand, and then drinks from the glass Sherlock hands him, almost chocking in his haste to satiate his thirst.

He’s clearly in pain from the fever, but Sherlock has little sympathy.

John is completely to blame for the way he’s feeling right now. Sherlock had not planned to escalate things so quickly, but John’s outburst in the cab could not go unpunished.  

Sherlock turns to leave.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock pauses, his posture impatient and annoyed.

John seems to shrink further under his covers. “Could you maybe bring me my computer?”

Sherlock retrieves John’s computer from his desk. Sherlock unplugs the power cord and the mouse, and wordlessly hands the laptop to John, who places it on his stomach.

Sherlock moves to leave again.

“Wait,” John says. “I was going to answer emails, but I can’t concentrate.” Cautiously, as if the statement is an apology: “Watch a movie with me?”

Sherlock considers this, eyeing the fevered pallor of John’s skin and the stiff way he holds himself against the bed, his body rigid with discomfort.

He sweeps away from the bedroom, relishing the way John’s face falls as he leaves.

Sherlock goes into the kitchen and searches through the shelves, settling on a packet of slightly dusty crisps.

When Sherlock returns to John’s bedside and presents the crisps to him, John stares at him, then at the packet, confusion written across his face.

“Your headache will be worse if you take those without eating.” Sherlock indicates the bottle of pills on John’s dresser.

Sherlock sits down in the chair next to John’s bed. “Well?” he says when John stares at him in surprise, not moving. “Are you going to start the movie?”

“Right,” John says. Unwilling to question Sherlock’s munificence, he opens the computer, angling the screen so Sherlock can see as well, and calls up the newest Bond movie. His fingers shake as he tries to open the packet of crisps, so Sherlock takes the bag from him, opens it easily, and hands it back, leaning back in his chair.

The movie is complete rubbish, but that doesn’t matter, because Sherlock’s too busy watching John to care.

John perks up a bit half an hour in, the pills doing their work, but this wears off quickly, and by the time the movie’s done, he’s worse off than when the movie began.

He’s breathing heavily, and his attention keeps shifting away from the action on the screen, his eyes distant. He didn’t eat many of the crisps, consuming them slowly at the beginning, still uncertain of his queasy stomach, and ultimately giving up and placing the more than half-full bag on his night stand.

As the closing credits roll across the screen, John stops the movie. “What did you think?” he asks.

Sherlock considers this, his mind so filled with John that it takes him a moment to recall anything of the movie.

“The man with the ridiculous letter instead of a name was not as terrible as the others,” he says finally.

“Q?”

“Yes, as I said, the one with the ridiculous name.”

“Says Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” John attempts a laugh, but it’s lacking his customary cheer; the humor laced with the ache of his fever.

Sherlock stands, taking the laptop from John and returning it to the desk, moves to the doorway.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock pauses.

“Listen, about before, in the cab.” John’s voice is faint, and he falters, fumbling over the words. “I’m sorry. I had a headache, and I…I didn’t mean to go off on you like that. I know this isn’t your type of thing.”

“What’s not my type of thing?”

“This. Me.” John shrugs, as if to indicate himself. “Sitting and watching crap movies with me. Taking care of someone who’s ill.”

“I am good at everything I do.”

“God, Sherlock, I’m trying to give to a compliment, yeah? You can just say thank you.”

John looks down. He looks beautiful like this: ill, and upset with himself. The pleasure of watching the guilt playing over his flushed features almost makes up for being forced to listen to his outburst in the cab.

John is such a kind, forgiving person, which is good because Sherlock does many things that might be said to require forgiveness.

“Thank you,” Sherlock says formally.

Outside John’s room, he shakes his head, denying John’s statement although he is not there to see it. John is wrong about Sherlock not being a good caretaker.

Sherlock cares about many things, John being chief among them.

When Sherlock goes to check on John later that night, he’s sleeping, his rest fitful and the sheets damp with the sweat of his fever.

Sherlock bends over him, watching John’s chest fall as he breathes in and out. He smells of soap and clean sheets and beneath that, faint but undeniable: the sweet scent of sickness. Already so lovely, and they’ve barely even started. Breathing in deeply, Sherlock gives John a soft kiss on his feverish forehead, and exits, closing the door quickly behind him so as not to wake him.

John needs his rest, after all: he has a big week ahead of him.

They’re going to have so much fun together. Sherlock can barely wait.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end note for additional warnings for this section (tangential to main narrative so not added to tags).

On Sunday, Sherlock gets up before John and makes a few simple adjustments to John’s phone and computer.

John wakes up feeling a bit better, although not well enough to leave the flat.

On most Sundays, John does chores (shopping, cleaning, paying his bills) and seeing people who are not Sherlock (Bill, Lestrade, current girlfriend).

Fortunately John is no shape to see anyone but Sherlock, nor will he be in the foreseeable future. His head still aches, and he’s slow and unsteady on his feet, weakened by the lack of adequate nourishment over the prior week, but with a lingering nausea that makes him wary of refueling properly.

John putters around the flat, making himself a light breakfast and lunch. He calls Sarah around noon, leaving a message on her mobile that he’s still feeling poorly and won’t be able to come in to work on Monday.

Sherlock listens to this call with interest, enjoying the way John’s voice breaks slightly on the word _ill_. The changes he made to John’s phone ensure that the message goes directly to Sherlock’s own phone, not to Sarah’s. Sherlock will have to think up an excuse to send her to explain John’s absence later, but right now he's anticipating listening to John’s message again and again, hearing the delicious rasp in his voice and the low, tired tones of his words.

John idly watches telly after the call, going into his bedroom only when Sherlock screams at him that the sound of the show is disrupting an experiment.

It’s dark when Sherlock realizes he hasn’t seen John for hours.

Sherlock’s been busy typing out an email to Sarah that he will send to her from John’s email . In it, John resigns from his position, explaining that he’s found a better paying job elsewhere, and strongly hinting that the real reason he’s leaving is because he has a new girlfriend and she doesn’t like him working for a boss whom he’s dated. Forcing himself to write in John’s purple prose is making Sherlock feel sick to his stomach (“I’m terribly, terribly sorry to tell you this, Sarah, but….”) and the exclamation marks he has to pepper through the email (“I hope we can work together again soon some day!”) make his teeth hurt.  

Still, Sherlock soldiers bravely on: The suggestion that their relationship’s to blame will stop Sarah ringing John up to try to convince him to stay, so the email is actually a key element of his plan.

But: enough is enough. The email finished (Sherlock’s John-voice so perfect that the doctor would swear he’d written it himself if he ever were to see it), Sherlock closes his computer and stalks into John’s bedroom.

John is shivering under his duvet, the extra blanket he’s added to his bed not enough to ward away the chill of his illness.

“You took your pills,” Sherlock says.

John nods. “Yeah. They’re not—”

Helping, Sherlock finishes for him. Clearly. Sherlock’s demonstrated his deductive abilities for John time and time again; Why does the man insist on explaining the obvious to him?

“Would you like to watch a movie?” Sherlock says.

“Another movie? You don’t like—”

“No, I don’t. You do, though.”

John takes a deep breath, his throat working. “That’s never been a reason for you to watch anything you don’t like.”

“I thought it might distract you.”

John gives him a confused, curious frown, but the fever’s crowding out his ability to question, and besides, John’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Okay,” he says.

The progress of getting the computer and selecting a move is accomplished without fanfare, and Sherlock settles into the chair by John’s bed.

John starts coughing when the opening credits appear, and Sherlock should be happy. He has everything he wants: John, helpless and weak, confined in a world that’s only him and Sherlock. But it's not enough. Sherlock liked the sensation of John’s body leaning against his yesterday, and he liked feeling John’s skin beneath his lips last night even more. Sitting by John’s bedside is not sufficient, he decides. Having John so close to him but not within his grasp is agony.

“I can’t see the movie,” Sherlock complains.

“I can move the screen if that would—” John offers, but Sherlock doesn’t wait for him to finish before he’s climbing up on the bed, gently pushing John to the side so that they can both lie parallel on it.

“Sherlock? What are you—”

“If I’m going to watch this idiotic movie with you, I should at least be able to see it,” Sherlock says.

“Watching a movie was your idea!”

“Quiet,” Sherlock says, reaching out to the keyboard to begin the movie. He’s arranged himself to his satisfaction, his head resting on the pillows next to John’s and his long body stretched out above the duvet. The bed is narrow, and he can feel the shape of John’s body against his own. The sensation is muffled by the cloth between them—John’s under the covers and Sherlock is not—but the heat of John’s fever radiates through the sheets, and Sherlock decides this is close enough for now.

They watch the movie. Sherlock doesn’t take in a single frame, as usual, but John’s in too much pain to notice, so that’s okay.

After the movie’s complete, Sherlock tells a sleepy John good night, wishing he could kiss him when he was awake, and wondering how long it will take before John allows him to do this.

Pausing in the door, he watches John slide into the space on the bed that Sherlock’s vacated, his arm stretching outward as if reaching for Sherlock to come back.

Not long then, Sherlock decides, and he’s grinning as he heads to his own bedroom, his every nerve afire with excitement. This week is shaping up to be even better than he expected.

 

On Monday Sherlock invents a pretext to leave the flat before John’s properly awake. He walks several blocks down Baker Street, and then rings John.

The changes he made to John’s phone make Sherlock call appear to be originating from John’s work, which is likely why John lets it ring three times before answering with a cautious “Hello?”

Sherlock adopts the Yorkshire accent of Dr. Andrew Morgan, a colleague of Sarah’s whom John doesn’t know very well, and explains that Sarah’s busy with a patient, but that they got his message about being ill, and it’s fine, take the whole week off if John needs it. Another doctor is back from maternity leave, so they’re not understaffed at the moment, and besides, it wouldn’t do to have the doctors infecting the patients with their illnesses, would it?

He and John have a nice little chat about work, and the weather and all sorts of mind-numbingly boring things. It’s so dull that Sherlock is barely paying attention to the conversation, until John mentions hesitantly that he’s having difficult time shaking his flu and maybe he could come down to get Dr. Morgan or someone else to prescribe something for him?

John’s voice trails off into nothing, as Sherlock strengths his grip on the phone, thinking.

“Dr. Morgan?” John asks when Sherlock doesn’t respond. “Dr. Morgan? My reception is bad sometimes, I’m not sure if—”

“I’m still here,” Sherlock interrupts him, remembering at the last moment to speak in Dr. Morgan’s Yorkshire accent. “I’m sorry; a bit of static on the line, I think. I don’t believe you need to come in, John.”

“No?”

“No.” Sherlock explains to John that they’ve had a flurry of flu cases lately, just seasonal illnesses going around. John can come in for an examination if he likes, of course, but there’s not much they could do for him beyond what he knows to do already: Get plenty of rest, hydrate, and let the illness run its course.

“You are taking it easy, aren’t you?” Sherlock asks John, and they have a little laugh about that: _Doctors are always the worst patients aren’t they. Haha._ John assures Dr. Morgan that he’s resting (Sherlock feels a thrill of pleasure run down his spine when John mentions that his flatmate’s been looking after him) and they ring off in good cheer.

The rest of the day likewise goes exactly as planned: John spends much of the morning in the loo, the water running in the sink not enough to cover up his retching. Sherlock chops up the right hand of a sailor that Molly gave him from an autopsy on the kitchen table, examining its musculature intently. Before Sherlock knows it, afternoon and evening have gone by, and John is stumbling into the kitchen to wish him good night, his limbs trembling and his face as wan as a ghost. John twists and turns in his bed for most of the night. Sherlock himself sits out in the living room for a good while, just listening to noises of John’s restless sleep and luxuriating in the image of John in his bedroom, wrapped in a cocoon of his illness.

All in all: a perfectly lovely day.

 

John decides to go for a walk on Tuesday.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Sherlock tells him. He’s stretched out lazily on the couch, texting Lestrade, who says he has a case but doesn’t. A murder’s not worthy of being called anything more than a nuisance if Sherlock can solve it using nothing more than his mobile.

“I didn’t ask for your advice,” John says, shrugging on his coat. Sherlock flicks his eyes toward him. After days of John wearing his pajamas around the clock, it’s odd to see him dressed to go out like this.

 “Some people can’t stand to be cooped up in the flat for days on end.”

Sherlock shrugs. He hasn’t been in the flat for days on end. He was outside only yesterday, but of course John likes to exaggerate. 

John pauses in the doorway. “You need anything from the chemist?”

Sherlock gives John a closer look. His eyes are glassy, and his coat hangs loosely around him, engulfing his small frame. Boot’s is three blocks away. If things are going as planned (and they are) there’s no way John can walk that far on his own.

“You need anything?” John asks again.

Sherlock shakes his head no, and listens as John heads down the stairs, his gait slow and unsteady. Then footsteps cease. Sherlock hears John having a brief conversation with Mrs. Hudson, who was leaving her rooms to buy her weekly scratch tickets at the corner shop: Mrs. Hudson, slipping into higher registers as she expresses her worry at how pale John looks; John, quiet, calm, saying it’s nothing, just a touch of flu.

It’s not ten minutes later that John’s back, his footsteps climbing up the stairs with less vigor than they went down them, pausing midway up as if he’s clutching to the bannister, waiting for the strength to continue.

The door opens, and Sherlock hears John’s ragged breaths and the way he stumbles as he takes off his coat. Sherlock teases himself with these delicious sounds of weakness, not allowing himself to look up, but he can’t resist for more than a minute before he sits up on the couch, and treats himself to sight of John, worn-out and shaking from nothing more than an attempt at a short walk.

“Shut up,” John tells him, hanging up his coat, and turning toward his bedroom.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said the walk was a bad idea, and I can hear you thinking that you were right all the way over here.”

Sherlock slides his gaze away from John, and makes a show of returning his attention to his phone, tapping out a response to Lestrade about the forensic report he’d just emailed him. “Well, then I didn’t have to say it then, did I?” he answers, his fingers flying over the phone.

John glares at him, and disappears into his bedroom. He goes to the kitchen to get himself a meager dinner around seven (biscuits and tea); otherwise he doesn’t leave his room for the rest of the day.

 

On Wednesday, Sherlock runs into Mrs. Hudson on the street, almost knocking her over as he rushes out of the door.

He’s in a hurry to buy ingredients for John’s medicine, and so he’s not pleased when Mrs. Hudson makes a surprised sound, and frowns up at Sherlock in rebuke. She makes a show of fixing her dress where bumping into him cast it eschew.

“Sherlock! Don’t you ever watch where you’re going!”

Idiotic question. Mrs. Hudson has seen him exit this door many times. She knows that he usually does watch where he is going. Today he did not. Sherlock is aware that she’s asking a rhetorical question to demonstrate that she is upset with him, but the imprecision of her meaningless inquiry still grates on his ears.

Telling her this would be less than useful though, so instead Sherlock allows his expression to soften slightly. “I didn’t know it would be you, Mrs. Hudson,” he says. Then, a pause, just long enough to show concern, before he adds, making sure the words sound foreign in his mouth: “I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Hudson folds immediately, beaming at him. “Oh, well, I know how you are. Always dashing about.”

Works like a charm, every time; Sherlock almost wants to laugh at how simple it is.

Be thoughtless and unkind to everyone, and then show a person a few slivers of politeness, convincing the target that he or she is the favored exception to the rudeness with which Sherlock treats the rest of the world. Result: People are grateful for the scrapes of common courtesy he affords them, believing that they have special status in his eyes, and Sherlock get to be a jerk most of the time while still getting people to like and trust him.

To be fair, Mrs. Hudson is especially easy, partially because he reminds her of the son she never had, partially because she owes him.

(Florida, years ago: Sherlock, age twelve, packed off to stay with the family friends the Hudsons in Orlando while Mycroft and his parents were abroad. Palm trees, heat, swimming pools. An aborted trip to Disneyworld that resulted in the park manager calling Eisner himself.

And of course, the drug enterprise Mr. Hudson ran from their one floor, ranch-style house, and the day he and Ms. Hudson had returned to the house to find Mr. Hudson lying unconscious next to a rival dealer, a bloodied knife in his hand. Mr. Hudson had only a flesh wound, clearly not mortal. The other man was lying in a pool of his own blood, but up close Sherlock could tell his wound was not fatal either; with treatment and a bit of luck he’d almost certainly recover.

Mrs. Hudson hadn’t said anything when Sherlock had gone to his bedroom, put on his gloves, used Mr. Hudson’s knife to sever the rival dealer’s carotid artery, and returned the knife to Mr. Hudson’s hand. She just watched during the less than five minutes this took Sherlock, holding one hand on her stomach, which pained her sometimes, because it wasn’t even two weeks ago that Mr. Hudson had beat her until she had lost this one too. Her expression never changed, except for one flicker at the end, when she almost smiled, and Sherlock thought for just a moment that he might have found a kindred spirit.

Florida didn’t give the death penalty for serious bodily injury, but it was on the books for murder.

Later, Sherlock had made sure to cry, shaking in Mrs. Hudson’s arms as he explained that he didn’t want to do it, but that he just couldn’t stand to see Mr. Hudson hurt her anymore. In reality, it had been exhilarating, that first time. Sherlock had never forgotten how easy it had been to make the flesh part under his blade or the simple pleasure of undoing a life with nothing more than one clean slice of his knife.)

“I’m just getting John’s medicine,” Sherlock says now. He watches Mrs. Hudson melt a little bit more at the thought that Sherlock—cold, inhuman Sherlock— is caring for his flatmate.

“Is John still poorly?” Mrs. Hudson asks. Again, stupid question: obviously he is, or why would Sherlock be getting his medicine? But she doesn’t want an answer, because she continues, “I ran into him yesterday when he was going for a walk, and said he’s got a bit of the flu. I hate to think of him all alone this afternoon while you’re off at the shops. I’ll stop in and make him a cuppa while you’re out.”

“No!” Sherlock says, more firmly than he’d intended.

Last thing he needs is Mrs. Hudson invading the flat to bring tea and sympathy to John. It wouldn’t do if she notices anything odd about John’s illness, and she’s much sharper than she looks. Besides, he didn’t start this whole process so John could spend his days watching makeover shows on the television with Mrs. Hudson. John is his.

“No,” Sherlock says again, more softly this time. “I’m sure John appreciates the gesture, but he’s contagious and he could never forgive himself you were to fall ill as well.”

“I’m not a delicate flower, Sherlock, I can—”

“No.” Sherlock’s voice is low, but there’s a firmness nestled within the softness that brokers no dissent. “No, Mrs. Hudson, he would not forgive himself. I can’t allow it.”

Mrs. Hudson considers this, flummoxed. “I don’t want to give him anything more to worry about, poor dear,” she says finally. “I’ll make you boys a pie instead. Give him something to get his strength up.”

Success. Repetition usually helps, Sherlock’s learned. People like to hear things twice; most of them can’t manage to take it in the first time. Mrs. Hudson’s looking to him to see if this suggestion is acceptable, and Sherlock favors her with a smile. Maybe if he plays this right, Sherlock can get Mrs. Hudson to take on John’s shopping duties as well.

“That would be very kind,” he says. “John hasn’t been up to the shopping this past couple of days.”

Mrs. Hudson sniffs. “Well, just this once. Because he’s ill.”

Sherlock acknowledges this limitation with a nod, thanks her again, and turns to leave.

“Just this once,” she repeats, “I’m not your—”

But Sherlock’s already halfway down the block, finally (finally!) on his way to the shops, and the rest of her sentence is lost in the background swell of London: cars, people, phones, the city sweeping in around him in a storm of noise and activity.

Doesn’t matter. Not like he couldn’t guess what she was going to say.

People are so predictable it almost hurts.

 

Thursday is a repeat of the rest of the week: John walking up shaking, feverish, trembling

He tries to eat around two, heating up a can of tomato soup on the stove, and at three he’s still in the bathroom, his retching audible to Sherlock who sits at the table, pretending to read the crime section of the paper but really relishing in the noises of John laboring over the toilet even though there is nothing left to come up.

Dinner is water and pills (John) and two slices of stale toast (Sherlock).

Night time means movie time, with Sherlock at his new position on the bed next to John, drinking in the sight of John’s labored breathing, his pale skin, and glaze of fever in his eyes. John hurts everywhere, but he does not complain because John is beautiful and brave and valiant.

John falls asleep before the movie is over, and Sherlock takes the laptop from him, giving him a kiss on the cheek. The feeling of John’s skin against his lips is tantalizingly brief: not enough. Sherlock wants much more, but John shifts under the covers, his rest uneasy, so all Sherlock does is risk one more quick kiss, darting his tongue out this time to lick John’s skin, tasting him.

John’s skin is wet with sweat and hot with fever, and this brief taste does nothing to satiate Sherlock's hunger. Sherlock wishes he could devour him. But it’s not time for that yet, so he leaves without waking John, and goes to his own bed, where his sleep is deep and untroubled. He does not dream.

 

On Friday, Sherlock takes a case.

He’s been busy with John’s treatment, and didn't want be distracted with anything else, but when the tall woman with the sad brown eyes arrives at the flat and asks if he can find the person who killed her son, Sherlock can’t resist saying yes. He can tell right away from the haunted look in the young man’s eyes in the photograph the woman shows him this case will have a satisfying solution, and a quick look at the man’s tox screen on the Yard site confirms that he's right. Sherlock’s sure that it’s not a murder. Her son committed suicide through intentional overdose, and Sherlock looks forward to telling this to the mother who has an inkling of the truth herself but who desperately wants her son’s death to be caused by someone other than himself.

John was wrong, when he said that the victim couldn’t have done it. John doesn’t like the idea that a person would be the cause of his own pain, which is because John is kind and because John doesn’t like to see people get hurt. It’s a nice thought, but the world doesn’t work that way.

In Sherlock’s experience, people usually get what’s coming to them.

Sherlock is at the young man’s flat when his phone beeps. _Where are you?_

John was still asleep when Sherlock left that morning, his sheets twisted around him as though he had tossed and turned in the night. Sherlock likes the thought of John waking up after his restless sleep, disorientated and confused and wondering where Sherlock was.

Sherlock waits a few minutes to respond, using the time to search through the work emails on the young man’s laptop: spam, bills from his bank, complaining about his boss, setting up meetings with his dealer (committing suicide was not the first stupid thing this man did, apparently). His attention is half on the emails, half on imaging John lying in bed, feverish and weak. Sherlock wonders if John’s frightened, decides that he must be.

Maybe he’s thinking right now: What if Sherlock doesn’t come back?

When he judges that the delay is long enough to heighten John’s fear, Sherlock texts John back: _Case._

His phone beeps almost immediately, as though John was clutching it in his hand, waiting for an answer: _Okay. How long?_

Sherlock stares at this for moment. John is worried. Probably too dizzy to get up and make himself breakfast or get his pills, too embarrassed to ask Mrs. Hudson for help. Perfect.

Sherlock tucks the phone back in his pocket without responding.

“What are you smiling about?” The young man’s mother is standing in the doorway of his room, her mouth a thin, unhappy line. “My son’s emails aren’t funny.”

Well, not if you don’t like dark humour.

Aloud, he says, “I’ll need to see more photographs of him if you’re got them. Preferably something older.”

“Photographs?”

Sherlock sighs. “Yes, I need to check a theory I have.”

The woman considers this, then nods.

At least there’s one good thing to be said for John’s blog; since Sherlock became known as the world’s most brilliant consulting detective, people have been increasingly willing to grant his odder requests. The word _theory_ helps, too: people tend to hear it as an order to stop thinking. This is good, because Sherlock doesn’t have any reason for asking for photographs of the victim. He’s just bored with this very simple case and wants to twist the knife a little.

“Older photographs? How old?” she asks. 

“The older you’ve got, the better,” Sherlock says. “Fifteen years, twenty. Baby photographs, if you have them.”

The woman blanches at this last sentence.

Sherlock looks at her evenly, his face clear of any guile: the rational detective who is brilliant at solving cases but who doesn’t really understand sentiment or human emotion.

“Problem?” he asks.

“No,” she says slowly. “No, I just…” She’s struggling to hold back tears. “I have the baby photographs of him at home, not here…I could go get them…”

Without waiting to hear the rest, Sherlock turns back to the computer, focusing again on the emails.

The woman doesn’t move; he can hear her sniffling behind him. “Why haven’t you left?” he asks without turning around. “I thought you wanted me to solve this case.”

This has the desired effect: She almost runs out of the room, crying in earnest now.

Sherlock’s still angry about how the woman commented on his expression at the computer, though, so when she comes back hours later, he sits her down on the couch and lets her go through the baby photographs with him one by one, saying he needs her to describe the location and event where the pictures were taken if he’s to confirm his theory.

She’s in tears again by the end, and she only sobs harder when Sherlock pulls out her son's emails to his dealer, the drugs he found in the nightstand drawer, and autopsy report he appropriated from the Yard’s online database to confirm what Sherlock was certain of within fifteen minutes of meeting the woman: her son’s death was not a murder.

In the cab on the way back to Baker Street, Sherlock, relaxed and loose in the way he is only after a case is finished, pulls out his phone again. Three unread texts, all of them from John.

How could he have forgotten John? Sherlock shuts everything out during his cases, but John’s always been the exception. Well, John used to be the exception before, back when he was out and about at his work, or spending time with half-wits like Bill. Back when Sherlock couldn’t escape the buzzing fear at the back of his mind that John was giving his attention, his smiles to someone who wasn’t Sherlock.

It was much better now, with John finally tucked away safe at the flat. But of course, there was a downside to this as well, because the removal of that nagging worry meant that Sherlock had put John out of his head completely.

Sherlock takes the stairs up two at a time in his haste to make sure John is okay.

The unchanged state of the kitchen and living room tells him that John hasn’t been out of his bedroom all day. Sherlock’s pulse increases a notch, but when he opens the door to John’s room, there he is: safe (if not entirely sound) in his bed, the sheets rising and falling slowly with his breathing.

Sherlock goes to John’s side and places at hand on John’s brow. The skin is hot, slick with sweat. John has a fever, his temperature higher than it should be given that he hasn’t had any of his medicine all day. Not good.

John’s eyes flutter open at Sherlock’s touch, and he peers blearily up at him. “Sherlock?” he asks softly, his voice heavy with sleep. “I thought you had a case.”

“Solved it.”

John attempts to sit up in the bed, his movements slow and uncertain, his hands unsteady as he unwraps the duvet that’s tangled around him. He looks very small against the covers. “Already? That was fast, even for you.”

“It’s nine pm. Not that fast.”

“Really?” John rubs at his eyes, looking more confused than before. “I could have sworn you just texted me you that you were on the case. It’s nine already?”

The fever must be disrupting John’s time-sense. Sherlock doesn’t like that John’s running a temperature when he’s not supposed to, but he does like imagining John waiting for him to return, lying in bed as the room spins around him, without even a clear sense of how much time has gone by. Time shouldn’t move for John anyway, not if Sherlock is away. It’s better for John to exist in suspended animation, frozen and waiting until Sherlock needs him again.

“You need to take something to bring the fever down,” Sherlock tells John.

“I don’t need—”

But the decision isn’t John’s to make. Before he can finish speaking, Sherlock is on his way out of the bedroom, returning quickly with a glass of water. He takes two of the acetaminophen pills from the bottle John has on his nightstand, and places them in John’s hand.

John looks down at the pills.

“Take them.”

John’s good at following orders, and Sherlock watches with pleasure as he obeys the command, the veins in his pale throat shifting as he shallows the pills. He’s slower to take the water, and his hands shake as he holds the glass, spilling droplets onto the duvet, where they temporarily stain the fabric a darker shade of blue.

“You need food as well.”

“Sherlock—” John protests, but again Sherlock is out of the bedroom before he can finish his sentence.

Sherlock looks through the kitchen for something to make. Without John to do the shopping, the shelves are beginning to look bare, and Sherlock reminds himself to follow up on his hints to have Mrs. Hudson take over John’s role in getting groceries.

He finally settles on a dusty can of tomato soup, twin to the one John threw up earlier, and heats it up on the stove, bringing a bowl of it into John’s bedroom, and offering to him.

John gives the bowl a dubious look. “I’m not hungry.”

“You can’t take those pills without eating.”

John still doesn’t reach for the bowl. His stomach must really be bothering him; John has barely eaten all week. Sherlock knows he is hungry. “It looks like blood,” he says.

“Blood is a darker shade of red than tomato soup, unless it’s extremely oxygenated, which would not be the case if this were obtained from a blood donation, which I’m assuming would be likely given the quanity. Further, this soup has pieces of tomato that have not been liquidized. Blood does not have chunks in it, unless one where to remove large cubes of flesh from the body and mix it with the blood, in which case the consistency would be—”

“God, Sherlock. It’s like you’re trying to make me ill.”

Sherlock watches John’s face, very careful to keep his own a blank, unreadable mask. What does John mean by this?

But it seems that, unfortunate implications of his comment aside, John’s statement was nothing more than his usual hyperbolic complaint, because he takes the bowl from Sherlock, pushing himself into a more upright position against the headboard. He blows on the soup to cool it, and takes a cautious spoonful.

“You said it looks like blood, and I am merely explaining why your observation is—”

“Christ!” John takes another spoonful. “See? I’m eating it.”

Clearly, Sherlock thinks but does not say. He sits down in the chair next to John’s bed, watching John with rapt attention as he slowly eats the soup. His hand shakes slightly as he holds the spoon, and he pulls a face with each mouthful, as though the act of swallowing pains him.

John pauses after five of these spoonfuls (Sherlock knows because he’s counting), giving Sherlock a look. “Well?”

“Well?”

“Aren’t you going to say, ‘Isn’t this easy? See how good the soup tastes once you try it.’”

 “It’s not easy. You’re clearly forcing yourself to eat even a quarter of the soup, and the expression you’re making indicates that you do not enjoy the taste. Why would I say that?”

John frowns at him, and takes another slow, careful bite. “That’s what my mum always said to me, when she was trying to me make eat when I was ill.”

“Ah. Lying.”

“Lying?”

“People lie to children all the time: Eat the soup, you’ll like it once you try it. Yes, it’s useful to know who Henry the Eight married. Don’t hit your brother, you’ll regret it when you’re older.”

This gets a smile from John. “You’re calling my mum a liar then?” he asks, mock-upset.

Sherlock, dead-pan: “Yes.”

“I’m guessing you never regretted hitting Mycroft.”

“Regretted not hitting him harder.”

John laughs. His face is flushed, his eyes clouded. It’s clear that he’s not feeling much better than he was when Sherlock first got back, but he’s making a valiant effort not to let the discomfort show nonetheless. Sherlock likes to imagine that this was what John was like when he was recovering after he was shot; cheerful, pleasant, trying to raise the spirits of everyone else in the hospital despite his injury.

“Who’d Henry the Eight marry then?” John asks. Half the soup’s finished, and he’s eating more slowly now.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Sherlock waves a hand carelessly. “Eleanor? Wasn’t there a queen named Eleanor?”

“Wrong country.”

“Elizabeth?”

“Right country. Wrong era.”

John starts to laugh again, but it turns into a cough, and then all at once he’s gagging, and pushing the bowl into Sherlock’s hands and rushing out of bed and into the hallway. Sherlock puts the bowl on the nightstand, and follows behind him as John heads towards the bathroom.

He doesn’t make it.

John throws up in the hallway, his entire body bent over the floor and shaking as he brings up the soup he’s just consumed in violent, rasping heaves.

Sherlock watches this from a few feet away, feeling a sharp thread of fear slice through him like barbed wire. Of course he likes to see John like this, small and helpless on the floor. But John hasn’t had any of his medicine all day. He isn’t supposed to be this ill.

It isn’t long before there is nothing more to come up; John hasn’t anything but the soup all day.

John gets up and heads to the bathroom, and Sherlock walks closely behind him.

“John—”

John shuts the bathroom door in Sherlock’s face, leaving him staring at the wooden barrier in silent fury. Sherlock can tell from the sound of the water running and the sounds of John’s movements that he’s trying to clean himself up, but Sherlock has a million questions running through his mind—why did John vomit? Was it something wrong with the soup? A delayed reaction to his medicines? Something else entirely?—and it is pure torture for John to shut him out like this, just when Sherlock most needs to be able to see him.

The water turns off, and the door opens to reveal John, his face drawn and the lines of his body tight with pain. John’s eyes are red, and Sherlock knows that this is from throwing up, but the visual effect is the same as if he’d been crying.

John stumbles on his way back to his bedroom, and Sherlock moves swiftly to his side, bringing an arm around John to support him. John is burning with fever, and his body feels thin and insubstantial through his shirt. Two more pounds lost this week, then.

It’s a measure of the severity of John’s weakness that he doesn’t protest when Sherlock brings him a clean shirt to change into.

Pale torso, scar on his shoulder, the hint of softness at his stomach gone and the lines of his ribs briefly visible when he raises his arms above his head to put on the shirt: three pounds lost, then, not two.

John lets Sherlock help him into bed as well, and it’s exhilarating and terrible at once: Sherlock finally has his longed-for control over John. The smaller man is pliant and helpless within his physical grasp, but for all the wrong reasons. John shouldn’t be this ill, not tonight, when he hasn’t had his medicines for hours.

“I need to go to the doctor,” John’s voice is as weak as the rest of him, and Sherlock has to lean over him to hear him clearly.

“Now?” Sherlock asks. “To the hospital?”

“No. Not an emergency. I can go to work tomorrow. They’re open on the weekend, and I think Sarah could get someone to see me. It’s been two weeks now, and I—”

“Dr. Morgan said that it was a just a seasonal illness and they couldn’t do anything.”

John’s lying under the covers, his eyes half-closed, but at this remark he sits up and looks at Sherlock. “How you do know what Dr. Morgan said? You weren’t in the flat when he called me.”

Ah. Not good. To a lesser man, this misstep would be cause for an expletive, but Sherlock is not a lesser man, so he only thinks: What’s the proper response?

The moments after one is caught in a lie are critical, and of course Sherlock is an expert liar. This is no instant when he freezes. No guilty jump or worry crosses his face, not even for an second. No, what Sherlock does is peer back at John, careful to keep his eyes and expression empty. 

Rushing in with a badly conceived excuse is the worst possible response. Better to give John nothing and let him come up with a explanation for Sherlock’s knowledge; it’s not like “Sherlock knows what Dr. Morgan said because he hacked into my phone and then impersonated him in order to discourage me from getting outside treatment” is going to be at the top of his list.

“It’s bad enough, Sherlock, that you let Mycroft bug my phone, but when he starts sharing his recordings of my calls with you—”

Mycroft. Sherlock wants to smile but doesn’t. The perfect explanation. For once his brother is useful.

 “He just wants you to be well,” Sherlock says smoothly.

“And he thinks recording my calls and telling you about them is the way to do it?”

“As do I,” Sherlock says. “You should be proud; your health is likely the first time we’ve agreed on anything.”

John doesn’t look proud; he’s still studying Sherlock curiously, his brow furrowed.

Sherlock needs to change the subject quickly. It won’t do for John to linger on this. There are too many reasons why it’s implausible for Mycroft to be the true source of Sherlock’s knowledge, and even John’s average mind will pick up on a few of them if he’s not distracted soon.

“I will go with you,” Sherlock announces.

“Tomorrow? To the doctor?” John’s voice cracks on the last word, the rawness underscoring his incredulity.  “You hate going to the doctor. When I tried to get you to get a physical last mouth you said the doctor is the only person you’d dislike seeing more than Mycroft.”

That John would remember this now, when he’s disorientated and weakened from vomiting, is not good. John’s not suspicious, exactly, but he’s not unconcerned either. However average John’s mind may be, he’s still a doctor, and his unconscious is likely picking up that something’s not entirely right about his illness.

Sherlock lets himself frown, a flicker of hurt passing briefly across his features. “I just want you to be well again,” he says, very quietly.

But John’s still not convinced. “You never cared before, about my health. I’ve been in danger for dozens of your cases, and you’ve never been bothered.”

This day is getting worse and worse. Sherlock needs to deflect this train of thought, quickly.

“John,” Sherlock says softly, drawing the word out. “I just don’t…” He pauses. When he begins again, he lets his voice tremble, just a bit (as with all great performances, the key is not to overdo it) and makes his words run into themselves in a jumble. “John, you’ve been ill before, but not like….I don’t….I just don’t like to see you like this. It’s not…” Sherlock trails off, and looks away from John, as if his fears for John have left him exposed and vulnerable.

John blinks slowly, his hands twisting the blanket. Guilt rises in a flush on his already feverish skin. “Sherlock, I—“

Sherlock brings his gaze back to John. His face is once again composed, but there’s a stiffness to his features that John will interpret as a clumsy attempt to hide his continued worry.

“Sherlock, it’s okay to be worried about a friend. It doesn’t make you weak.”

John, calling him weak! Sherlock wants to laugh, but unfortunately his role of “Detective Who Only Realizes How Much John Means to Him When He’s Worried He’s Going to Lose Him” doesn’t call for it. 

“I’m not worried,” Sherlock says, letting some of his customary coldness creep back into his voice.

“Sherlock.” How sweet: John can be reproving even with he’s sick.

“Maybe a little,” Sherlock admits. Before John can jump in, he continues, “The shopping’s suffered since you’ve been ill. And I don’t have my assistant on my cases.”

John smiles, tolerantly allowing Sherlock to use humour to lighten the situation. “I’d like it if you came with me tomorrow.”

Sherlock looks at him, his eyebrows raised as if to say _Are you sure?_

“I want you to come,” John repeats.

“All right.”

“It’s just the flu,” John says quietly, reassuring, and the thought that John is trying to comfort _him_ is almost unbearably delightful. “They’ll give me medicine and I’ll be better soon.”

“I know that,” Sherlock says, and moves toward the bed to take one of John’s hands in his own. He feel the heat burning in John’s palm and the fever racing under his skin.

Sherlock wants to kiss him again, but even though he’s been pushing at the physical barriers between them, Sherlock doesn’t think John’s ready for that, not when he’s awake. Not yet, anyway, so Sherlock just squeezes his hand once instead, and lets go, giving John a brief, hopeful smile before he slips out of the room, closing the door smoothly behind him.

 

 

Heading toward the couch, Sherlock is so distracted—his mind filled with suppositions about John’s adverse reaction to the soup—that he almost steps in the vomitus on the floor.

John was right. In the half-lit gloom of the hallway, the soup looks just like blood.

 

 

Cleaning up is not pleasant, so Sherlock does his best to send his mind away during that part.

After, Sherlock washes up, changing his clothing and standing in the shower for a long time as the water pours down around him. Sherlock likes smelling the sickness on John, but he can’t stand to be unclean himself. Any hint of it on him and Sherlock feels as though he’s been infected.

When he’s finally free from contaminants, he sits down the couch, and closes his eyes.

His phone beeps. Sherlock knows who it is, but he opens his eyes, and he picks it up anyway.

_I told you this will end badly._

Sherlock frowns. Mycroft. What does he know?

The phone beeps again. _Plenty._

Wrong. He’s only properly started John’s treatment this week. Nothing has ended, badly or otherwise.

Sherlock’s about to put the phone down when it beeps again.

_I didn’t say that it had ended badly, only that it will. Be careful, Sherlock. We don’t want a repeat of the Victor Trevor situation._

This time Sherlock does put the phone down on the table, shaking his head in disgust.

Victor Trevor was years ago, juvenilia at best. John is Sherlock’s masterpiece. To compare the two is not just unfair, it’s useless. 

Sherlock steeples his fingers together, thinking hard. Mycroft is wrong. Sherlock is still in control, and he is going to fix this. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Suicide, derogatory comments about suicide, murder, spousal abuse, miscarriage.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings for this section at end (tangential to main narrative, so not in tags.)

John is not the first person Sherlock has made ill on purpose.

When Sherlock was at university, he lured Victor Trevor into the basement of one of the dormitories, chained him up, and hid him there undetected for fifty-six days.

On the first day of Victor’s imprisonment, Sherlock left Victor lying in the basement unconscious. Sherlock locked the door, and hummed one of his compositions for the violin as went upstairs to go to his chemistry tutorial.

By this point in his life, Sherlock had known several criminals, and he was aware that people usually felt guilty after committing crimes. He’d observed the symptoms of guilt many times: the sweating, the shifty eyes, the shaking hands. He also knew that kidnapping Victor broke several laws and that most people would say that it broke many moral principles as well.

His search within himself for similar feelings of guilt came up empty, however. Sherlock did not feel guilty. Why should he? He’d kidnapped Victor for a perfectly reasonably purpose, after all.

Killing the drug dealer in Florida to ensure Mr. Hudson’s execution had been the most powerful experience of Sherlock’s life. When he’d returned to England, he hadn’t been able to get the rush of excitement he’d felt as he’d sliced the man’s throat open out of his head. When he closed his eyes to go to sleep at night, he felt the slick wet slide of blood over his gloves and the weight of the knife in his hands. He dreamed of it every night, blood-red dreams as though the world had been filmed through a red haze, and Sherlock hardly ever dreamed.

To Sherlock, who was bored with everything and seldom felt much of anything other than annoyance, the thrill of murder had been intoxicating and infuriating all at once. It wasn’t enough; he wanted much more, and when he returned home from America he’d spent the next several years chasing every high he could find, searching for something that would finally make him feel again.

He’d tried drugs (at first what he could buy on the street, then more exotic combinations he cooked up himself) as well as experiments on small animals he collected in the forest outside his family’s home, but nothing worked.

Sherlock knew that killing a human was the most likely way to replicate the emotion he’d felt in Florida, but he was wary of getting caught. He’d gotten lucky in Florida, he’d realized. Bad police work from a small department unused to dealing with murder, plus the fact that he’d been just a child at the time, and thus an unlikely suspect.

Besides, Sherlock didn’t want the exact same expeirence. He wanted something new and different but just as wonderful. He wanted to know how it felt to slice open a throat without gloves on and let the blood run down his bare hands. Or to be the one with his throat sliced open, to lay pliant and helpless as the life drained out of him. The man in Florida had been unconscious when Sherlock had killed him, and so had robbed Sherlock of the chance to watch his eyes as the life left them.

But of course, Sherlock wouldn’t get to experience exsanguination first hand; at least, not if Sherlock wasn’t willing to make it the last experience he’d ever have.

Which was why Sherlock had decided, midway into his first year at university, that he needed Victor.

Victor had been disappointing in the beginning. There was the screaming, which annoyed Sherlock. He’d sound proofed the basement, so Sherlock was not worried that anyone would hear him. But Victor’s antics buzzed at the back of Sherlock’s awareness like an angry wasp throwing itself against a window and made it difficult for Sherlock to concentrate on his experiments. It was incredibly inconsiderate. Victor, it seemed, had no regard for the utility of Sherlock’s experiments, no respect for science in general, and, worse of all, no concern for the comfort of anyone but himself.

Happily the screaming stopped soon enough after Sherlock showed Victor his knives, and demonstrated his willingness to use them.

The real issue was Victor’s unwillingness to calm down and accept his situation. Sherlock had been less patient when he was in university than he is currently, but he still thought he’d been fairly generous, giving Victor several days to adjust before he performed the more tasking experiments on him.

It hadn’t helped. Sherlock had imagined that Victor would have welcomed the experiments to lessen the boredom of capacity—at that point in his life Sherlock had not fully grasped that most people’s minds lacked the ability to understand how overwhelmingly dull the world was—but he had not. If anything, the experiments made it worse. There was still the begging, and the pleading, the praying, the crying. And this occurred every single time Sherlock brought out his knife, or the Bunsen burner, or the snakes.

An accident was what fixed it, in the end.

(Sherlock doesn’t like the idea of genius by accident. It’s normally heartwarming nonsense about children inventing a new type of candy by spilling sugar and chocolate in the kitcken. Stupid, and useless. The insensible randomness of it infruates Sherlock because what he does is science and not chance. The chance aspect of it all is really the only thing that he still feels ashamed about when he thinks of the Victor incident).

Sherlock had given Victor an injection of a mixture of various compounds. Sherlock wanted to see their reaction on Victor’s nervous system, so he was not surprised or especially interested when the injection sent Victor into a series of paroxysms and seizures.

Sherlock had produced this result in Victor several times already, and found it dull. Especially the part where he had to watch Victor twitching and twisting to make sure that he didn’t bite out his tongue during his fit. 

What happened after the seizures was more interesting.

When the convulsions finally ceased, Sherlock helped Victor into the bed he’d installed in the basement, and sat by his bedside, telling Victor various facts in an attempt to make him less upset: Victor was at the university, in a place he knew, not kidnapped and taken away to an unknown destination. Sherlock valued Victor’s use as a test subject, and would ensure that he remain usable. Victor was safe.

In the past, Sherlock’s attempts to placate Victor had been unsuccessful; If anything, Sherlock’s statements made Victor more upset.

But after receiving the new drug, Victor had listened intently, his eyes wide and credulous. For several hours after talking to Sherlock, he was much less animated. Sherlock even heard Victor listing Sherlock’s statements (“I’m safe, Sherlock cares about me”) softly to himself as he curled up in a ball and rocked back and forth on his bed.

This new drug, Sherlock learned after a few more experiments, caused a period of convulsions and unconsciousness. After the seizure ceased and Victor regained consciousness, he experienced a period of extreme suggestibility that lasted for several hours.  During this period, Sherlock could not get Victor to believe things that were outlandish or impossible (“You are the Prime Minister”, “You can fly”). But Sherlock could convince Victor to believe things that were more likely to be true, or that Victor wished were true (“I am your friend” “I will not hurt you.”).

Victor had been interested in Sherlock romantically, which was how Sherlock had convinced Victor to join him in the basement to begin with, and for a while Sherlock used the suggestive state the drug induced in Victor to convince Victor that he and Sherlock were in a relationship.

This proved to be a disappointment. Sherlock soon tired of Victor’s mouth and tongue and everything else his body had to offer. Sex was just like everything else ordinary people did to amuse themselves: deathly dull, and pointless.

But crafting a better, stronger version of the new drug and testing it on Victor? That was a task that was both purposeful and exciting. 

Until the day when Sherlock went too far, and decided to give Victor a dosage of the suggestiveness drug along with some of the cocaine Sherlock kept for personal use. What he’d wanted to do was see how the drugs affected each other. What resulted was an unusable subject and a basement laboratory in a state of chaos.

Sherlock had soundproofed the basement, but he hadn’t thought to try to keep out smells. He had a day, perhaps two if the weather held, and then he’d have a serious issue.

It wasn’t unexpected, really. Victor had been thoughtless and disruptive from the beginning, so of course he’d choose to die at the beginning of summer.

He hated to do it, but there was no choice, so Sherlock had gone up to his dorm room and done the thing he liked least in the world: He called his brother. 

 

It hadn’t taken Mycroft long to arrive.

Sherlock didn’t say anything when he led his brother down to the basement, and Mycroft didn’t say anything when he examined the state of Sherlock’s lab.

He didn’t have to. His expression had said it all.

 

Today, Sherlock could name five ways to dispose of a body, and that’s without any available materials. Add the materials found at a typical chemist, and the list goes up to thirty. Add a laboratory of chemicals, and the list becomes endless.

But back then? Well, all Sherlock can say in his defense is that he had been very young and inexperienced, and that it wasn’t right to be too hard on him because weren’t we all young once?

 

On Saturday, Sherlock is up well before John, which is not difficult because Sherlock never went to sleep at all.

Sherlock could obtain a number of ingredients at the chemist, but for the more exotic components he’d had to break into Bart’s, and that had taken some time. Plus that there was titration, and mixing, and tempering, and so on and so forth, and with one thing and another, the task of producing a replica of the suggestive drug he'd developed with Victor had not left Sherlock with enough time to sleep.

This doesn’t matter.  Sherlock is not tired. He feels sharp and alert, as tightly drawn as one of his bow strings after tuning. The worry of last night has vanished, and Sherlock has a plan.

Sherlock’s sitting at the table pretending to read the news on his phone when John stumbles into the kitchen. He’s wearing jeans, which is unfortunate (the material is too thick to allow for the smooth injection of a needle) and a white t-shirt. He doesn’t have on one of the jumpers he favors, and when he goes to the coat rack and examines his wool coat without putting it on, Sherlock determines why. John itches from the illness, and the wool of a jumper or coat would feel too rough against his skin. The arms, then, Sherlock decides. Not ideal—legs are better for this drug—but good enough. Sherlock can make do.

John turns away from the coat rack. “Well?”

Sherlock stares back at John without answering. _Well, what?_ Someone else would say, but Sherlock has no need for useless clarifications.

“The drop-in clinic opens in forty-five minutes,” John says. “I want to be there when they do. Are you coming or did you change your mind about going with me?”

Stupid, stupid stupid. Sherlock’s wiling to cut John some slack because he’s sick, but really? Just take a look, John: Sherlock, up far earlier than is customary for him unless he’s on a case. Dressed in one of suits. Any moron could tell that Sherlock is still planning on accompanying John.

“We’ve not going until you’ve eaten something,” Sherlock says.

“I’m not—”

“—going to the doctor until you’ve eaten something,” Sherlock concludes for him. For John to say he's not  _hungry_ would be a lie. John’s very hungry. A great deal of his symptoms are due to not eating sufficiently, not to Sherlock’s ministrations.

“I’m not—” John tries again.

“Arguing with me any longer when you know it’s futile,” Sherlock says smoothly, rising from his chair to take John’s arm and guide him smoothly to the table. He applies gentle pressure to John’s arm, pressing down, and is gratified when John lets himself be maneuvered into his chair.

So obedient. Sherlock has always loved watching John succumb so easily to his orders, and it’s even better now with the weakness of John’s illness palpable in his trembling limbs and pale features.

Sherlock turns away from John, going to the counter to take down a bowl to prepare his breakfast. John eating is a crucial element of his plan. As the unfortunate situation with Victor demonstrated, the drug he’s going to use on John is physically taxing, and John’s body is already weakened. He will not be able to withstand the drug on an empty stomach. 

“It’s not amusing or clever, Sherlock, finishing my sentences like…” John begins, the petulance draining away from John’s features when Sherlock returns to the table, placing a bowl of John’s favourite cereal mixed with milk in front of him.

John peers down at the bowl, and then up at Sherlock’s face, which is carefully composed. His features are mostly an emotionless mask, but his concern is still apparent in his raised eyebrows and tight smile. To John, this will appear as though Sherlock is worried about John’s health but feels self-conscious about engaging in the caregiving function of providing a meal and is trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to hide it.

“You did the shopping,” John says.

Really, John? How’s Sherlock supposed to respond to that? Should he make an equally to obvious remark—“Yes, and gravity still seems be functioning as usual”—or is John expecting Sherlock to praise his deductive skill in realizing that if Sherlock is serving him cereal that wasn’t in the flat the day before, Sherlock went to the shops to acquire it?

But that’s not in character, so all Sherlock does is give John another small smile and sit down beside him at the table. Normally he’d play the whole “Aloof Genius Transformed into Worried Friend” bit more subtly, but John’s not operating at his highest capacity today and Sherlock apparently needs to make his acting more obvious.

“And got my favourite cereal.”

Dear God. Again, John, beautiful job stating the obvious.

John frowns down at the bowl. “I didn’t think you knew what I liked.”

Sherlock summons all of his patience, and gives John a hopeful smile. Of course Sherlock knows John’s favourite cereal, but John is not aware of this. On the rare occasions that he does the shopping, Sherlock always buys the wrong things on purpose for several reasons: it discourages John from asking him to do the shopping again and, more importantly, when Sherlock needs to get John on his side, he can buy the correct item and have John view it as an extraordinary gesture of caring and kindness rather than simple competence.

“I wanted to make sure you ate breakfast,” Sherlock says.

John returns Sherlock’s anxious smile and then (finally!) lifts his spoon and begins to eat.

Sherlock watches John eat for several moments, then, realizing that this unnerves him, picks up his phone and begins looking through a news site. He pretends to read an article, but really his attention is still focused on John.

John’s eating is slow, hesitant. He’s remembering how he vomited yesterday, and he doesn’t trust his stomach. The way his hand trembles as it holds the spoon is beautiful. Sherlock could watch him for hours, and it’s only when he reminds himself that it’s of utmost importance that John doesn’t suspect anything today that Sherlock is able to tear his eyes away from John and return them to his phone.

Soon, John’s done eating and stepping into the kitchen to put away his bowl. 

Sherlock sits at the table, free to run his eyes over John with the other man’s back turned away from him as he rinses the bowl in the sink.

The vomiting yesterday, Sherlock has decided, is not something to worry about. John had eaten and then thrown up a bowl of tomato soup on Thursday, so it’s no wonder John threw up when Sherlock gave him another bowl of tomato soup on Friday. When John threw up on Thursday, it was because of the medicines Sherlock had given him, but John didn’t know that. All he knew was that he ingested tomato soup and then vomited less than an hour later. John’s conclusion: the tomato soup made him ill. So, John comes to associate the smell and taste and redness of the soup with sickness, and his body responded by becoming ill when Sherlock tried to feed him the same type of soup a day later.

Of course, John’s reaction is wrong, and the soup was not what made him ill. Correlation is not causation, but try to telling that to an idiot.

“Are we going?” John asks. The bowl’s on the dish rack drying, and John’s standing by the door. “I assume you still want to come?”

Again with the obvious questions.

"Clearly,” Sherlock says. He puts on his coat, placing one hand in his pocket, carefully feeling the syringe he put there in the early hours of the morning.

 _The game’s afoot_ is a silly quotation that rises to his mind before he dismisses it.  The game is John and he’s not going anywhere. 

Sherlock takes his hand out of his pocket, and gives John a careful smile: soft up-curve of the lips, no teeth. Don’t let the prey see the gun until you’re ready to shoot him. 

“Let’s go,” he says. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Minor character death. Not John or Sherlock.
> 
> Sorry for the long delay (due to RL commitments). There is another section written, which will be added soon after I edit it a bit.


	6. Chapter 6

Getting a cab is not difficult. John gives the cabbie the address of the clinic, and they’re off, the cab moving slowly through the early morning traffic.

John’s talking about something dull regarding doctors’ shifts and who might be in on a Saturday that Sherlock tries to ignore. The next bit is the most delicate part of Sherlock’s plan. He can’t afford to have anything go wrong.

Sherlock had decided in the beginning that he would treat the progression of John’s illness as carefully as one might treat a courtship, and like a courtship, timing is crucial. Sherlock must choose exactly the right moment to declare his intentions.

They’re almost but not quite halfway to the clinic when Sherlock strikes.

John’s in the middle of an inane, unfunny monologue about whether it would be proper for Sarah to treat him given their prior relationship (“It might be a bit awkward if I have to get my kit off, haha”), and Sherlock takes out the syringe, holding his hand over it so John won’t see it. They’re sitting side by side in the back of the cab, and Sherlock decides that John’s right arm is the best site because he will not have to reach across John’s body to perform the injection.

Target selected, Sherlock moves quickly, injecting the medicine into John’s upper arm. If things go as planned, John won’t remember these events accurately, but Sherlock isn’t taking any chances, and so he returns the syringe to his coat pocket as quickly as his dexterous fingers can manage.

John opens his mouth in shock, and moves his left hand to grasp his arm, the way one might attempt to bat away a wasp that’s already left its sting.

“Ow! That hurts. What is that? Sherlock, did you—”

And then the medicine hits him, and John starts to scream.

Sherlock claps a hand over John’s mouth. Sherlock moves quickly, but a piece of the scream still escapes, ringing in the interior of the car like the sound of a gun firing.

That one scream is all the alarm John is able to sound because after that the medicine hits his nervous system in full, and John no longer has control of his limbs or his voice. He sinks back, his head lolling against the back of the seat. His arms and legs begin to shake, and his eyes roll into the back of his head. If he’d been standing up, he would have fallen.

The cabbie turns around and stares at John, his eyebrows raised in shock. He’s a young man with rich brown hair and a full beard. “Is he alright?” the cabbie asks, the wrinkles on his forehead deepening as he sees how Sherlock’s hand is covering John’s mouth.

Sherlock moves his hand away. Stupid: He's been sloppy. John can’t keep screaming with the drug scrambling his nervous system.  

“Keep your eyes on the road,” he snaps, just as the cabbie doesn't move when the light turns green and the car behind them honks.

The cabbie puts his foot on the gas and moves them through the intersection. John continues to convulse. Sherlock grabs both of John’s arms so that John doesn’t accidently strike him.

“Is he alright?” the cabbie asks.

For God’s sake. If Sherlock didn’t know that most people are idiots, he’d have said that the universe was testing him with the constant questions about perfectly obvious realities.

“He doesn’t look alright,” the cabbie answers his own question. Despite Sherlock’s command, he’s twisting around in his seat again to stare at John. “He looks like he’s having a fit. I should call 999.” The cabbie uses one hand to steer and the other to pick up his mobile from where it rests on the dashboard.

“No!”

Sherlock’s voice is sharp, the word laced with venom.

The cabbie’s fingers pause on the screen of his phone, uncertain. “He really doesn’t look okay,” he says. “I should call.”

“No,” Sherlock says again, more quietly this time.

John’s arms are shaking with more force, pushing against his grasp. Sherlock knows these are convulsions and not volitional movements, but it feels to him as though John is trying to escape his grip. Sherlock tightens his fingers around John’s arm, reassuring himself with the tangible heat and sensation of John’s flesh pressed against him. John is not going to escape him. “My friend is epileptic,” he explains. “If you take us back, I can give him his medicine at home and he’ll get better.”

Of course John’s symptoms are all wrong for epilepsy but Sherlock’s counting on a cabbie not knowing that.

“Shouldn't we go see a doctor? The address you gave me was for a clinic. We should just go there.”

“No. Take us back home.”

“I don’t think—”

“Turn the cab around and take us back. I have his anticonsulvent medicine at home.” When the cabbie doesn’t respond, Sherlock clarifies, “Take us to 221B. Where you picked us up.”

The cabbie looks back at John, and then shifts his attention to the road, turning left at the next interaction. If he was going to take them back to 221B, he’d have turned right.

Wonderful. The last thing Sherlock needs is a cabbie who wants to make life difficult for him; he’s had enough of that for a lifetime with the Jefferson Hope situation.

“Take us back to 221B.” Sherlock’s voice is low, and full of silky malevolence. The _or else_ is felt unspoken.

People think you need to shout to be heard. They’re wrong. Say the right thing quietly, and people lean in to listen because they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t hear what you say.

Case in point: Sherlock’s statement captures the cabbie’s attention. The cabbie risks a quick glance at his passengers before bringing his eyes back to the road. He’s clutching the wheel tightly, and there is a bead of sweat on his forehead. Add John still shaking in the back seat, and the interior of the car has become a distinctly uncomfortable place. Sherlock doesn’t mind discomfort; at all. To the contrary, he relishes in it. Sherlock creates situations that are socially uncomfortable on purpose all the time. But ordinary people don’t like awkwardness, and they’ll do almost anything to escape it.

Surely now the cabbie will acquiesce to his request and take them back.

Another frown. The cabbie uses one hand to rub at his tired eyes, the other hand on the wheel. Cautiously: “Your friend doesn’t look well. I really think he should go to the doctor. At the very least. Maybe even to hospital.”

Oh, look, how sweet: the cabbie has a conscience. Maybe he’s not so ordinary after all.

But enough is enough.

Sherlock releases John for a moment, and leans forward, assessing the cabbie.  

“Listen,” the cabbie begins, “I don’t know what—”

(Shirt: old and worn, a tear at the sleeve mended poorly with the wrong colour of thread. Musculature of the right hand more developed than that of the left, calluses visible on the fingers as they grip the wheel. Photograph on the dashboard of the cabbie with his arm around a young girl, six or seven years of age. His eyes are red, the pupils small. Slight tremor in the hands. He’s been up for hours and took something (probably some type of low-grade speed, street quality at best) to stay awake. Conclusion: The cabbie was previously employed in a position that required him to use his hands, likely a  manufacturing job. He was let go recently, and turned to driving a cab to support himself and his daughter. He might have driven some shifts on the side before he lost his other job, judging by his above-average knowledge of London streets, but now it’s his sole source of income. He’s taking extra shifts on to earn more money, and he’s tired, and worried, and afraid. He’s moral man, and lives by his principles: No wedding ring means he’s likely no longer in a relationship with his daughter’s mother. Balance of probabilities says the daughter lives with her mother, but he’s still determined to do everything he can to provide for her.)

“—you think you can care take of your friend at home, but I think he needs a doctor now.”

Assessment complete, Sherlock leans back in his seat, and grips John’s arm again, trying to quiet his convulsions.

“You have two choices,” Sherlock says. “One, you drive us back home. I give you triple the fare. I give my friend his clonazpam, and he recovers. You, my friend, and I are all unharmed.” Sherlock waits a beat, letting the pause underline his last sentence. “Two, you insist on taking us to the doctor. He doesn’t have the proper medicine for my friend on hand, and my friend dies or becomes seriously ill. I sue you for negligence. You lose the case, your license, and everything you have.” Sherlock waits, letting the second silence hang heavy in the car.

When Sherlock speaks again, his voice is bright, almost cheerful. “So, which will it be?”

 

Fortunately the traffic is light, and it doesn’t take them long to get back to Baker Street.

Sherlock leans forward to pay the cabbie, who hesitates before he accepts the bills in Sherlock’s hand. The cabbie looks down at the money, frowning as though the bills are unclean. He's thinking that this looks a lot like a bribe. “I’ll help you take your friend up,” he offers.

“No.” Sherlock’s flat tone makes it clear that his answer is final.

Carrying John out of the cab and up the stairs to Baker Street is not easy. John’s not a large man, and Sherlock is strong, but carrying any adult human is difficult and John’s shaking limbs don’t make the task any easier.

Sherlock is covered with a sheen of sweat by the time he manages to place John on his bed. His shirt sticks to him and he feels overheated in his heavy wool coat. The cabbie watched Sherlock carry John across the street and didn’t drive away until they were inside the building: a bad sign.

But Sherlock will have to deal with the cabbie later. He has more pressing matters to attend to presently.

Sherlock doesn’t like the feeling of sweat on him, so he washes his face in the bathroom and then goes to his own bedroom and changes into his loose dressing gown. This takes just over three minutes, which is about how long Sherlock feels comfortable leaving John alone in his present state.

John has not changed during Sherlock’s brief absence. He’s still unconscious, his eyes open but unseeing and his limbs shuddering with his convulsions.

Sherlock sits down beside John’s bed. He could reach over to touch John, or undress him, or kiss him again or do whatever he liked. John’s in no shape to stop him. But for once, Sherlock’s feels no need to bring John’s skin against his own. He has John within his power, yes, but John’s body is useless to him when John’s mind is elsewhere.

Sherlock brings his hands together in his lap as though he was about to say a prayer. He watches, and he waits.

 

The next part is very boring.

John’s unconsciousness lasts for the better part of an hour, during which time Sherlock is loath to leave John’s side. The convulsions cease before this, the trembling lessening in intensity before it stops completely. But Sherlock cannot leave John before he wakes for fear he would vomit and choke on it, or shallow his tongue, or do any of a number of useless and unpleasant activities.

Wasted time annoys Sherlock, so he performs a few chores in John’s room, making several adjustments to John’s computer and one of his books, keeping on eye on John all the while.

Sadly, after these small takes are accomplished, Sherlock is left with nothing to do but return to the chair by John’s bed, and wait for John to regain consciousness. 

Sherlock already knows the effect that the suggestive drug has a person, and there’s nothing new to be gained watching John tremble and twitch. The task is necessary but tedious, and Sherlock hates necessary but tedious tasks. Vigil at the ailing doctor’s bedside: it sounds like the name of a Victorian daguerrotype. How dull.

Worse, John is unconscious for far longer than Victor had ever been. This means that Sherlock miscalculated the dosage and gave John too much and that he really has no one to blame but himself for this dullness.

Sherlock was working on a catalogue of fungi before he began John’s treatment, and he does his best to relieve his boredom by running through his list of fungi species as he waits for John to wake up. Sherlock likes the strangeness of fungi. He likes how they can’t be pinned into traditional categories because they aren’t plants or animals but rather sui generis, a creation unlike anything else. He likes the thought of fungi reaching into soil or dead flesh, creating a chain of connections as they colonize their hosts with their cells. It pleases him to imagine John’s illness like that: tendrils of sickness clawing their way into John’s body and transforming him from the inside out into something new and better, a tool fashioned solely for Sherlock’s desire.

Perhaps he should infect John with a fungus for the next stage of his disease.

Sherlock’s running the ways to accomplish this through his head--Aspergillus fungi cause a lovely cough and chest pain but the blurred vision that comes with a croptococcosis infection would be delightful as well. He feels like a child at a candy shop; it's so difficult to choose just one--when John opens his eyes.

“Sherlock?” John’s pupils are large and unfocused.

Sherlock gets out of his chair and goes to John’s side. He takes John’s hand into his own, and is pleased when John doesn’t protest or attempt to withdraw. Instead, John squeezes Sherlock’s hand as if for reassurance and gazes up at him, his face filled with confusion.

“John.” Sherlock brings all of the comfort and conviction he can infuse into a mere recitation of a name.

“What happened?”

Sherlock smiles.

For once, he does not resent this question from John. What happened is not obvious at all because Sherlock is going to create John’s reality.

 

The next stage is less boring than the previous, but only marginally.

Sherlock knows how to use his face as a tool to get John to do what he wants—disarming smiles, dissembling frowns—but his face is a blunt instrument compared to the fine-tuned weapon that is his voice. Sherlock’s voice is rich and sonorous, imbued with the power of persuasion, and now he employs this force to full effect to enthrall John in a web of words.

It isn’t really a conversation. John asks Sherlock again and again what happened, and Sherlock explains the narrative that he wants John to believe. They repeat this dialogue over and over, like a scene from a play performed for an audience with short-term memory loss.

Several hours later, and Sherlock’s shirt is again sticking to his skin, his body flushed and weary. He has been calming and patient for hours, and the repetition, difficult from the beginning, has become tortuous.

Enough is enough. Sherlock decides that he cannot stand to do this any longer. If John doesn’t believe the false memories after Sherlock has told them to him thirty-seven times, he never will.

Sherlock tells John to sleep. The drug has made John fatigued, and he’s quick to obey, falling asleep soon after his eyes close.

Sherlock goes to his bedroom and changes clothing for a second time, discarding his dressing gown for a shirt and trousers. He glances at the weather report on his phone, and then puts on his coat, and after a moment’s consideration, wraps his scarf around his neck as well. London’s due for a cool evening.

 

John looks even weaker when Sherlock returns to his bedroom: smaller, more delicate. Helpless. The drug has slowed down his reflexes and his heatbeat. His breathing is shallow and slow, and if one viewed him from a distance he’d look dead rather than sleeping. John could easily lapse into a coma and then stop breathing at any time, and Sherlock doesn’t want to leave him.

But it can’t be helped.

The cabbie saw how ill John was and he knew that something was wrong with how Sherlock responded to John’s seizure. He might not report the incident, but then again he might. He’s a moral man, and people tend to think, not unreasonably, that they’ve done something wrong after being bribed. Worse, the cabbie would be able to report more than a vague description of an ill man whose companion prevented him from getting medical treatment. Sherlock does love his black cabs, but there’s one drawback with using them as opposed to the Tube. The cabbie knows where they live.

And the longer Sherlock waits, the greater the chance he’ll decide to report it, if he hasn’t done so already. Sherlock can’t take that risk. He can't count on anyone but himself if things go wrong.

 _This is the last time, Sherlock,_ Mycroft had said that long ago day in the dormitory basement after the Victor situation came to its ignoble end, _that I’m cleaning up one of your little messes._

Sherlock reaches into his pocket, and takes out the photograph he stole from the cabbie’s dashboard when he paid the fare. The cabbie and his daughter look back at him, the girl’s smile revealing a gap in her teeth. Behind them, the photograph includes buildings and a street sign, more than enough information for Sherlock to determine where it was taken.

Sherlock puts the photograph away, and kisses John on the forehead, savoring the heated flush of John’s skin under his lips. John shifts under the blankets, and makes a soft sound, but he does not wake.

Sherlock backs away from the bed, and then runs his eyes over John again. His breathing is short, shallow, the bed covers barely rising and falling with each breath. Sherlock is not storing up images of John in case he dies before Sherlock returns, because John is not going to die.

Sherlock takes one last look at John, and then slips out of the room.

He has work to do. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No update for now (sorry!) but if any one is interested haven't forgotten this and I know the ending--just need to write when RL calms down a bit.

It’s still Saturday when Sherlock finishes taking care of the cabbie, but only just.

He walks home quickly, his mind consumed with thoughts of John. He’s worried that the drug will harm John when Sherlock is not there to help him, but more than that, he’s worried that that John will wake up, remember everything that happening accurately (including Sherlock injecting him with the suggestiveness drug) and leave.

Sherlock checks the GPS he installed on John’s phone frequently as he walks down the dark London streets. There’s no change to its location, but this is little consolation. All the GPS tells Sherlock is that John’s phone is still in the flat, not that John is.

Returning home to find John dead is something Sherlock could deal with. He doesn’t want John to die, obviously, but he’d have the body at least. Dead and in the flat, John would still be his. But if John were missing? Unthinkable. Impossible. Sherlock cannot allow John to leave him.

  
Sherlock takes the stairs up to 221B two at a time, and heads directly to John’s room once he’s inside.

For a moment, Sherlock is so filled with the fear that John might have left that he actually sees it: the empty bed, the wrinkled sheets, John’s phone sitting abandoned on the nightstand. Then he blinks, and realizes that it’s an illusion. The bed is not empty; John is lying in it in the same position he was when Sherlock left him.

Sherlock steps closer and sees that his other fear has not come true either. John is alive. Breathing slowly, yes, but alive.

An ordinary person would breathe a sigh of relief, but Sherlock is not an ordinary person.

Relief is useless. A waste of time and brain power. Instead of indulging in a pointless exercise of emotion, Sherlock turns his attention to practicalities. What needs to be done? John needs water. At this point dehydration is as likely as the drug to cause him harm. Besides that, Sherlock needs to clean up after his errand.

Deciding to clean up first—self-preservation comes before caring for others, always, and to act in any other way is to be an idiot—Sherlock goes to his own bedroom and changes into his clothing.

He takes his discarded garments to the laundry machine at the back of the flat. Sherlock had used a rope to take care of the cabbie—he found the rope in the cabbie’s flat, and left it lying beside the body—so his errand had not been as messy as it might have been if useful materials had not been as readily at hand. Still, there could be evidence of his activities on his clothing: the cabbie’s skin flakes, fibre from the rope. Even a trace could be enough to tie him to the cabbie’s death, and Sherlock will not allow himself to be convicted because he neglected to do the laundry. He’s captured lesser men for just such an omission, and Sherlock is not the man he claims to be if he falls prey to such a simple error.

Sherlock puts the clothing into the washing machine. They do laundry on Sundays so there’s a basket of clothing and towls sitting by the washing machine waiting to be cleaned, and Sherlock adds some of these into the machine as well. He begins the cycle and goes into the kitchen, where he pours a glass of water for John.

John has not moved since Sherlock left him. He gives no sign of being about to wake soon. Sherlock is not in the mood to wait for him, so he leans over John in the bed and presses down on his chest with one hand, increasing the force until John’s eyes flutter open.

 Sherlock ceases the pressure. He allows his face to show his concern for John, but is careful not to show the true depth of his worry. The next few moments will be crucial, but John doesn’t need to know that.

John looks up at Sherlock without speaking. His eyes are clouded, confusion written in his furrowed brow, but no anger. A good sign. Surely John would be furious if he remembered Sherlock injecting him with the drug. John is not one to hide his emotions.

“How do you feel?” Sherlock asks; then answers his own question before John can speak, “Tired.” Sherlock is careful to keep his voice calm, even, and low. He leans over John, taking care that every inch of his appearance broadcasts his role for the evening: Sherlock Holmes, playing the part of Loyal and Caring Friend. Would a man who had injected John with an illegal drug gaze at him now with such solicitude? No, of course not. Never.

John brings an unsteady hand up from where it rests on the duvet to rub at his forehead. “My head hurts."

Sherlock gives him the glass of water, pressing it into John’s hand when John does not move to take it on his own.

John looks down at the glass as though it is a foreign artifact that he does not know how to use.

“Drink it,” Sherlock orders, and when John does not move to do so, adds in a tone of a mild rebuke, “John.”

John drinks.

His throat bobs delicately, and Sherlock allows himself to savor this sight for a moment, then slides his gaze back to John’s face, searching for any fear or distrust, or any sign that John remembers the events in the cab.

John lowers the glass. He looks down at the duvet, interrupting Sherlock’s inquiry of his features. His hand trembles, about to drop the glass. Sherlock takes it from John before he spills it, and sits down in the chair beside John’s bed.

“What happened?” John asks.

Aw. The pivotal question.

Sherlock takes a slip from the glass to draw the moment out. It wouldn’t do to answer too quickly; the Loyal and Caring Friend has nothing to hide, and so would not rush to fill the silence with babbling. Caution and restraint are to be Sherlock’s watch words now.

His eyes still fixed on John, Sherlock is surprised to taste the saliva left where John’s lips had been on the rim of the glass before him. Sherlock drinks deeply, bringing the traces John has left on the glass into himself, rolling the taste of John’s salvia in his mouth and delighting in the flavor of it on his tongue. If only he could consume John as easily.

One sip, another. Sherlock places the now half-full glass on the nightstand. “What do you remember?” he asks finally.

“We went to the clinic. Sarah examined me, I think? She took my blood pressure, and did some tests and then…” John pauses. He’s still looking down at the bedcovers, not meeting Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock detects fear—just a hint—in his voice. “We went to hospital, after. Maybe? I think we did. It’s all jumbled up and confused.”

A tingle of relief threads down Sherlock’s spine. He wants to smile but doesn’t. Of course, it would be better if John remembered the false memories Sherlock had implanted more clearly, but John’s false recollection is not bad at all. Sherlock can work with this.

“You had an extremely high fever. I’m surprised you remember that much.”

“I did?” John asks. He pressed one hand to his head. Clearly it’s paining him. He’s still dehydrated, Sherlock decides. He needs to get John to drink more water. “I don’t have a fever now.”

“They gave you medicine to bring it down.”

“Oh.” John pauses. He picks at a loose thread on the duvet, still not meeting Sherlock’s eyes. Hmmm. Perhaps the drug did not work so well after all. John may not be able to deduce as Sherlock does, but he has a very keen intuition, and his unwillingness to look at Sherlock indicates that he senses something is wrong.

“What happened?” John asks. “At the hospital, I mean. What did they do?”

“You don’t remember anything?”

John shakes his head. “Sarah wasn’t happy with the test results, I think, and she said we needed to go the hospital for some more tests. She wanted to get an ambulance. You were very rude to her, I remember that.” John frowns at Sherlock, then returns his gaze to the duvet, as though he fears Sherlock’s reaction to this criticism. “You refused to take the ambulance, and told her not to be silly—“

“I believe the phase I used was melodramatic idiocy.”

“And we all took a cab, I think, to the hospital,” John finishes. “I’ve told you before, Sherlock, about being rude to Sarah—”

“Calling an ambulance would have taken longer than a cab at that hour,” Sherlock interrupts. Faking anger at Sarah isn’t difficult. When he made up the scenario he wanted John to remember, Sherlock had imagined in his head how everything would work out, and he had decided that Sarah’s response to a friend and former boyfriend becoming seriously ill would be to forgot her professional duty to him as a doctor and become hysterical. From there, extrapolating Sarah’s emotional and impractical reactions to John’s imagined illness had been so easy and realistic that Sherlock found himself becoming so upset at her incompetence that he almost forgot that none of it had actually occurred.

“You didn’t need to shout at her.” Filled with anger at Sherlock’s rudeness, John finally manages to look Sherlock in the face.  
Good. Adding in the realistic little details always helps with the subject’s ability to believe the false memories.

“It would have taken ten minutes longer for the ambulance at that time of day, John,” Sherlock says.

“Ten minutes is nothing.”

Sherlock raises an eyebrow. “Nothing? Ten minutes can be everything.”

“Only if the patient is in a critical condition,” John says. “I wasn’t in a critical condition.”

“Yes, you were.”

“No, I wasn’t. I swear, Sherlock, Sarah wasn’t the one overreacting, you were being irrational and—”

“You don’t remember, John,” Sherlock interrupts, “how bad were.”

At this John flushes and looks away from Sherlock, his eyes draw downward as if by averting his gaze he could escape the seriousness of his illness.

A long silence, then, Sherlock, quietly, “Do you remember the diagnosis?”

“The diagnosis?” John repeats softly.

“The one they gave you at hospital?”

John still won’t meet Sherlock’s eyes. When he speaks, it’s slow and uncertain, and Sherlock can’t tell if this is because he doesn’t want what he’s saying to be true or because he doesn’t believe it is true. “I remember them doing more examinations at hospital. Drawing blood. Calling in a specialist. There was…it wasn’t good, was it?” Off Sherlock’s confusion, he adds, “The diagnosis.” John’s voice is firmer now, more sure. “The news was bad, I remember that. They said I had some rare disease. I can’t remember the name—”

“Spattergroit,” Sherlock interrupts.

John gives him a look of disbelief. “Really? Spatta…Spatta..” He gives up trying to say the name and frowns. “Why couldn’t I at least get a disease with a good name? Something with a bit of dignity. Not…Spatter…Spatta…” John stumbles over the name.

“Spattergroit.”

“It sounds like the last name of a teenager with a skin condition.” John’s laugh sounds more like a bark, and there’s little humour in it.

“You said the same thing at the hospital,” Sherlock improvises, thinking this adds a touch of vicissitude to the imagined events.

“At least I’m consistent.” John says. He attempts a smile, and Sherlock returns his grin, but the moment of levity is brief, and John is serious again when he asks, “How did I get it?”

“It’s caused by a parasite,” Sherlock explains. “The doctors think you got it in Afghanistan. When you were treating soldiers in the field. Or maybe after you were shot.”

John frowns as the remaining humour drains from his face. He says the name of his illness under his breath several times to himself, half as though he can’t believe it and half as though engraining the name in his brain. “A parasite? I’ve never heard of it before.”

“The doctors said it’s extremely rare.”

“And the prognosis? I know the doctors said something, but the details are fuzzy. I can’t seem to remember anything clearly.”

Now it’s Sherlock’s turn to look away. He glances down at his hands, and out of the corner of his eye watches John’s already pale face grow whiter. Sherlock knows what John’s thinking: If Sherlock, the man who never misses a chance to impart knowledge, doesn’t want to tell him, then the news must be really bad.

“How long did they say I have? Years? Months? Weeks?”

Sherlock just shakes his head.

John’s white as a sheet now; looks like he’s about to cry.

Sherlock wishes he would cry. Tears would look lovely trailing down those pale cheeks. The tears would shine in the artificial light of the bedroom and Sherlock could reach out in the guise of comforting John and feel the wetness of his sorrow under his fingertips, could marvel in tge sensation of John’s emotions made manifest.

But John pulls himself together with an effort, and the moment passes.

Sherlock realizes that he’s leaning forward in his chair, eager for tears that will not arrive. He forces himself to sit up straighter, careful to keep his disappointment from showing on his features.

“I don’t suppose the hospital gave you a pamphlet?” John asks. “No, they wouldn’t have one; not for a rare disease. I suppose I can read up on Spattergroit”—John manages to pronounce the name correctly this time, if a made up disease can be said to have a correct pronunciation—“when I’m feeling up to it.”

“Do you think you could manage to eat? They said you needed food.”

John shakes his head no. “It would probably just come back up if I tried.”

Pity. Sherlock was looking forward to beginning the next phase of John’s treatment tomorrow morning, but John really needs to get some food inside him before that occurs. It’s too risky to continue with John still weak from the drug and with an empty stomach on top of it.

“Maybe after more rest I could try to eat something small?” John says. He closes his eyes, leaning back against his pillows.

Sherlock takes this movement as a signal to leave, standing up and turning toward the doorway.

“It just seems so unbelievable.” John’s voice is quiet behind Sherlock, almost as if he’s speaking to himself.

Sherlock turns back to the bed. John’s figure looks very small, his body almost disappearing under the folds of the covers, as though Sherlock had returned to find John vanished after all, with nothing left of him but his voice. “What’s unbelievable?”

“Everything.”

Sherlock gives him a look, and John frowns back at him.

Sherlock is about to ask John if he could be clearer and explain just which aspect of the innumerable facets of existence he finds perplexing when John continues, “Me. Getting ill. Throwing up, headaches, fever, weakness for days, and supposedly it’s all because of a parasite I got in Afghanistan? There have been no symptoms since I got back, and now I suddenly become ill? And the disease is so rare that I never heard of it, but somehow doctors were able to diagnose me in a day? And I can’t seem to remember anything after getting into the cab to the clinic yesterday clearly? None of this makes any sense.”

John says this all in a burst, and the intensity of his emotion seems to exhaust him. He closes his eyes again, breathing heavily.

“Today,” Sherlock says. His pulse is racing. Someone less self-possessed would allow his fear to become apparent. Sherlock is not that person; he regards John calmly, his face a picture of perfect composure even though John has his eyes closed and cannot see him. A master performer is perfect even when the audience isn't watching.

“What?” John responds without opening his eyes.

“The cab ride to the clinic was today, not yesterday. It’s not midnight yet.”

John waves a hand above the covers, pushing this correction away. “Today, yesterday, doesn’t matter. Still no reason why my memories should suddenly be so fuzzy. A parasite wouldn’t do that, I don’t think. The doctors must be wrong. Must be a more reasonable explanation. A new strain of flu seems more likely.”

Trust John to seize on all the weaknesses in Sherlock’s explanation. Why does John have to be a doctor? Why couldn’t he have been an ordinary soldier, or solicitor, someone who would be easier to fool?

But Sherlock shouldn’t be so annoyed. John being a doctor is part of what makes this so much fun, isn’t it? Otherwise it’d be like lying to a blind man about what colour his shirt is: facile, pointless, dull. Winning a game is only fun if the opponent’s worthy, and Sherlock can’t help but feel a frisson of excitement run down his spine at the thought of John coming close to uncovering his deception.

“When you’ve eliminated the impossible—”

“Whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the answer. Yes, yes.” John’s tone is weary. “I know. You’ve said that about a million times. But still. I just don’t believe it’s a parasite. I should call Mike. Maybe he knows someone who can give me a second opinion.”

Sherlock’s mind is really racing now. There are a million answers he could give to John’s concerns about his diagnosis: Parasites can cause all sorts of unusual symptoms. John hasn’t heard of every single illness that exists in Afghanistan. The doctors could diagnose him so quickly because there have been a number of these cases with soldiers on leave who became ill because of the same parasite. The doctors at the hospital have state of the art medical equipment and don’t make incorrect diagnoses.

Sherlock opens his mouth to explain all of this, and then closes it when he realizes his mistake.

Sherlock Holmes, defending doctors? Sherlock, telling John to trust in the authority of a respected medical institution rather than seeking the truth for himself? No. It’s all wrong.

Seizing on a method that’s more in keeping with his Mad Genius with a Heart of Gold role, Sherlock says, “You’re right.”

“I am?” John opens his eyes to gaze at Sherlock curiously. “I mean, of course I am.”

“Yes. A parasite?” Sherlock laughs, his voice laced with scorn. “The very idea is ludicrous. Laughable.”

“Yes,” John repeats, nodding along with what Sherlock’s saying. “Laughable.”

“I knew as soon as Sarah started weeping that none of the doctors at the hospital would be professional. Letting emotions get in the way. No respect for the science. They rushed through half of the tests they did on you. I could have done a better job with my lab in the flat. In fact, I will do a better job.”

A wariness creeps into John’s expression. “What?”

“Just have to get my equipment together,” Sherlock continues as though John hadn’t said anything. “Can’t trust the results from tests performed by emotional fools. I’ll run my own tests here, get to the bottom of what’s wrong with you.”

Before John can respond to this, Sherlock strides over to him, and pulls, none too gently, at John’s hair.

John moves his head away from him, then brings a hand up to rub at his scalp. “Sherlock, what are you doing?”

“Hairs,” Sherlock says shortly, opening his hand to show John the blonde strands in his palm. “For the tests. Hair should be fine for now. I can get the blood and urine later.”

“I don’t think—”

“No, of course not. You never do.”

John glares at him. “Is now really the time for insults to my intelligence?”

Sherlock doesn’t deign to offer a response to this. He’s just insulted John’s intellect, so surely this is the time for insults, isn’t it? Why must John continue to plague Sherlock with these insufferable questions? It’s not as if Sherlock has ever done anything so cruel to him.

“The doctors at the hospital are professionals, Sherlock,” John says. “There’s no reason to think you can get more accurate results here in the flat than they can with top of the range medical equipment.”

Aw, just as he predicted. John might question his diagnosis, but when Sherlock does the same thing, John feels compelled to defend the integrity of the medical profession.

“Medical professionals don’t start weeping when they hear a patient’s diagnosis.”

“Sherlock, I don’t know what your issue is with Sarah, but she really is a very—”

“You don’t have a deadly parasite,” Sherlock interrupts, allowing his voice to tremble, just a bit. “You don’t. No. My tests will show that you don’t.”

Pain plays across John’s features. He managed not to cry before, but now the corners of his eyes grow wet, and he brings one hand up to rub at his eyes.

Lovely. The thought of his own death isn’t enough to make John weep, but Sherlock’s pain is enough to bring him to tears. John—so selfless, so beautiful. And this is a reaction John’s seen before, surely. John is no stranger to death, after all. He’s seen it all, telling families when the patient isn't going to get better: the mother who bursts into tears when she hears the fatal diagnosis, the father who punches a wall. Isn’t it fitting that Sherlock would be the best friend who refuses to accept the truth and who channels his grief into fruitlessly searching for another explanation? It’s a stroke of genius really—there’s no better way to get John to stop questioning his diagnosis than for Sherlock himself to refuse to believe it. It’s the perfect role: Sherlock, the grief-stricken amateur scientist in denial who tells himself that can cure John’s deadly illness with a home-made chemistry set.

“Sherlock—” John’s voice is soft, the pity in his eyes touching.

“The tests will take several hours.” Sherlock grins, but it’s fake, stiff, his face like a mask he doesn’t know how to properly move. To John, it will look as though Sherlock is trying to paper a smile over his grief, and fooling no one.

John sinks back into his pillow. Sherlock’s refusal to accept the truth seems to have exhausted him. “You won’t find anything different than they did at the hospital,” he mumbles.

“You’ll sleep?” Uncharacteristic uncertainty in Sherlock’s voice makes this a question rather than an order.

John nods, his eyes already closing.

Sherlock knows he shouldn’t kiss John; he’s not ready for it yet. But he can’t stop himself from leaning over John’s bed and breathing in the hot, honeyed scent of his illness—enthralling! Intoxicating! Exquisite! The heady rush of it perfume to Sherlock’s senses—before slipping out of the room.

 

It’s Sunday.

Sherlock’s bent over his microscope, peering at a close up view of John’s hair. It’s the early hours of the day, and Sherlock is up before the sun is, the flat still covered in the darkness.

The experiments may have begun as a ruse to get John to stop challenging his diagnosis, but they have proven unexceptedly benefical in other ways as well. Sherlock’s gaining all sorts of valuable data about John’s physical condition, and he’s getting loads of delightful ideas he can employ during the next phase of John’s treatment.

The clock strikes the hour, and the beep of the washing machine draws Sherlock out of his work.

He sighs, gets up, and goes into the hallway.

Taking the clothes out of the washing machine and putting them in the drier is the height of tedium. It’s insufferable not having John to deal with these loathsome household tasks. Sherlock’s really going to have to find a way to convince Mrs. Hudson to help out soon.

Sherlock places a towel into the drier, uncovering the shirt and trousers he wore last night when he was taking care of the cabbie. He picks up the clothes, examining them. To the naked eye, there’s no sign they’re been used in any nefarious activities, but then there wouldn’t be. And the washing machine has almost certainly removed any microscopic traces of Sherlock’s activities. But almost certain isn’t absolutely certain, and so it isn’t good enough.

The clothes will have to go.

It’s too bad that Sherlock is such a fastidious killer, because if the clothes were torn or dirty, at least he’d have an excuse to throw them away. Now he’s going to have to ruin a perfectly good outfit, which is annoying, but has to be done. People don’t throw away clothing that isn’t ruined, and Sherlock won’t do anything that isn’t normal when he’s cleaning up after one of his little errands.

Sherlock eyes the offending clothing critically for a moment, and then drops the shirt and trousers on the top of the washing machine.  
He finishes putting the rest of the laundry into the drier and turns on the machine. He scans the area, his eyes lighting on a container of bleach. He unscrews the cap, and knocks the container over, spilling bleach across the shirt and trousers.

There. Perfect. Any idiot can do routine domestic tasks, but Sherlock’s cultivated such a character of cluelessness in these areas that no one would think it odd for him to spill bleach while trying to do the laundry.

Cleaning everything up requires more tedious labour, but when the bleach is mopped up and the clothes have been tossed in the bin, Sherlock feels a glow of satisfaction. By the time anyone knows the cabbie is dead, the clothes will have been at the dump for hours, their provenance untraceable to Sherlock and their bleached fabric an easy explanation for any rag-picker who is curious about why they’ve been thrown away.

Sherlock returns to the microscope. Chores finished, the tension that he’s been carrying with him ever since the encounter with the cabbie finally loosens, and a feeling of quiet contentment steals over him.

He finds himself humming as he works—one of his own compositions—and forces himself to stop. It wouldn’t do to wake up John. Sherlock’s ready to start the day now, of course. There’s so much to be done, what with the rest of the experiments, and the next phase of John’s treatment, and that’s even before John gets into the surprises Sherlock placed for him in his bedroom.

But Sherlock must be patient. John is ill, and needs his rest, and Sherlock must remember that John’s needs must come before Sherlock’s pleasures.

That’s okay. Sherlock can wait.

They’ll still be able to have plenty of fun together in the morning.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s ten on Sunday morning when John wakes up. It’s not that late, but Sherlock feels like it is because he’s been waiting for John to wake up for hours.

It hasn’t been boring. Sherlock’s had plenty to occupy himself. There are the experiments with John’s hair, and some articles on skin grafts that he’s been meaning to read for a while now (Sherlock loves looking at the photographs that accompany these articles, there’s something that’s almost appetizing about seeing skin rent from flesh). He still needs to make some minor adjustments to John’s computer too.

He can do this last task without entering John’s room. Yesterday when the suggestiveness drug had knocked John out, Sherlock had altered John’s computer so that Sherlock could make changes to it remotely.

He’s engaged in this activity when John wakes up. He’s stretched out on the couch, and typing. The sounds that John makes are faint: the sheets move, and there is a soft groan as John sits up, but Sherlock is listening intently for them, and so he hears everything.

John still isn’t feeling well; Sherlock can tell by the way he moves.

Sherlock thinks about going into the bedroom. Some of what’s wrong with John at this point is dehydration and lack of food, and Sherlock could remedy this by bringing him water and a sandwich. But it’s better to wait. He likes imaging John in the bedroom, his symptoms slowly getting worse. First, a tickling the back of his throat, then an agony of thirst. John will debate: Should he try to get out of bed and see if he can make it to the kitchen? Or should he ask Sherlock for help? John will be wary of trying to walk as far as the kitchen, but he won't like asking Sherlock for help either.

He’s such a self-sufficient man.  Well, _was_ a self-sufficient man. John’s going to have to learn that if he wants to get anything done now, he’s going to need Sherlock.

Two hours pass. No sounds from John’s room now: just the tap, tap, tap of Sherlock pounding away on his computer.

He finishes a web page, and hits publish. He stands up.

Sherlock’s delayed long enough. John’s thirst must be raging by now.

Sherlock pours a glass of water—food can wait a little longer, it’s more fun to stretch this out and watch John improve slowly—and takes a bottle of pills from the kitchen counter. This is something else he prepared while John was sleeping. The label says it’s a prescription for John H. Watson, and the typeface and style look actually like it was issued by a pharmacy. This is because it was: Sherlock stole the prescription pad from another doctor when he visited John at the clinic a while ago, not having a real use for it at the time, but figuring it would come in handy eventually. Like most of his impulses, he was right.

The pharmacy issued pills for pain relief, but Sherlock poured those out and replaced them with his own custom made pills, which he’s sure are going to be a lot more fun.

John’s not in his bed.

For just a moment, when the door is partially but not all open, all Sherlock can see is the empty bed. It would be foolish and a mistake to say that Sherlock’s heart starts to pound or even that he’s worried, because Sherlock’s heart beats normally and because he is not worried.

He would have heard John leave his room, let alone the flat. All that Sherlock feels is a bit of annoyance with himself because he had been trying to listen to John’s actions closely, and he should have heard John getting out of bed. He must have been too engrossed in his computer to notice. Sherlock would not call the singular focus that allows him to fixate on a task to the exclusion of all else a fault, but it can be annoying at times when he does not take in information that his senses should have imparted to him.

The door opens all the way, and there John is, sitting on the floor beside his bookshelf. He has one of his books open on his lap—a large, dusty volume—and is reading. He doesn’t look up, and Sherlock feels a smile spread across his face. Sherlock is not the only one who doesn’t hear things when busy sometimes, but of course, John routinely ignores things that should be obvious, so perhaps his lack of attention not a great condolence.

Sherlock schools his features into an expression of concern before he says, softly, “John.”

John glances up at him. His face is pale, and his brow is furrowed. Sherlock has an idea as to what John is reading, but even without his foreknowledge he would know from John’s expression that his reading material wasn’t pleasant.

“Should you be out of bed?” Sherlock says. He’s not feeling tired from his night of no sleep, but he’s feeling a physical sense of heaviness that steals over him sometimes when his mind is alert and eager but his body is not. He gives into that sensation now, letting it show in a slight relaxation of his features that John will likely interpret as worry that Sherlock doesn’t really want him to know about.

“I’m barely out of bed.” John’s tone is going for wry, but he just sounds tired.

Sherlock steps over to him, and holds out the glass.

John takes it.

Closer to him, Sherlock can see that his hair is matted. The longer pieces at the front are slightly greasy and stuck together.

He needs a shower. Most people wouldn’t be able to smell it, but Sherlock can: sweat, and salt, and underneath that: the sweet smell of illness that Sherlock liked so much when he smelled it before. John’s hair is too long, as well, and if (when) he doesn’t get better, Sherlock will need to be the one who cuts it.

Won’t that be fun? Sherlock likes to think of it: he’ll use a razor, maybe, instead of scissors, and bringing the blade so close to John’s skin will be lovely. He will be able to run his hand through John’s hair, breathe him in, and feel the delicate bones of his spine at the base of his head.

Sherlock sits down on the floor next to John. “You need to drink that, and take two of these.” He holds out the pill bottle.

“What’s this?”

“They gave it to you at hospital.”

John takes the bottle, examining the label before opening it and taking the pills as directed. Sherlock will never, he decides, be tired of watching his throat move as he swallows.

“Thanks,” John says, but he doesn’t sound grateful.

Sherlock takes the book from him, and peers down at the page. He likes what he sees, but he keeps this from showing on his face. “This is woefully out of date,” he says, and hands the book back to John.

“I know,” John says. “I just figured, as a starting point—”

“Ridiculous to start from something you know is wrong.”

“It’s not wrong.”

Sherlock just shakes his head.

“It’s not,” John says, but he closes the book anyway, using his thumb as a bookmark for where he was reading, as though he intends to go back to the book when Sherlock leaves.

“Is.” Sherlock lets his voice sound as childish as their mock-fight is, and gets a faint smile from John.

The title on the spine of the book says _Diseases and Infections_. The book is old, the covers tattered, and the dust on the jacket says that it hasn’t been taken off the shelf since John put it there when he moved in. Dust speaks volumes, of course, to the educated reader, but like any text, what it speaks is not necessarily true. Sherlock’s especially proud of the job he’s done on this dust jacket to make it look untouched for years: it took him a good half of an hour of delicate tinkering with his toolkit while John was lying in bed, recovering from the effects of the suggestiveness drug, to achieve the look. Of course, it’s completely wasted on John, who knows nothing about how to read dust. The task was not unlike composing a flawless imitation of an unknown Shakespearian play that you’re trying to sell to someone who’s illiterate, but Sherlock must and will be flawless in all things, even if his audience is far too stupid (as they usually are) to appreciate the heights of his genus.

“You know,” John says quietly, “Spattergroit’s in here.”

Sherlock does know this. He’s the one who tore out the original page 98 in the section “Parasites and their Effects” and inserted the new version that included a description of John’s fictitious illness.

“It’s funny,” John continues, “that they knew about it back then. I mean, the text doesn’t say much about it, but I must have read it, back when I was a student. I even took notes on it. See?” He opens the book to the place marked by his thumb, and offers to show the text to Sherlock again.

Sherlock doesn’t take it.

Is John trying to insult him, or is he just being stupid again? Sherlock looked at the book previously for several seconds. Does John really think that Sherlock is so slow a reader that this wouldn’t be enough time for him to take in everything that’s on the page?

Yes, probably, Sherlock decides, glancing at John, who is giving no sign that he means anything insulting by his offer of the book. Really, it’s enough to try the patience of a saint, the way John refuses to acknowledge Sherlock’s skills so frequently, and Sherlock knows that he’s not much of a saint. John’s just lucky that Sherlock hasn’t done anything terrible to him, to punish him for the mistreatment that he gives Sherlock on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

“You misspelled ‘Afghanistan’,” Sherlock says.

“I did?”

John looks down at the book. Sherlock added the notes in a perfect imitation of John’s handwriting next to the entry on spattergroit: _Teacher says its a rare illness, with most of the cases found in the Middle East (mostly in Iraq and Aphghanistan)._ “Hah,” he says. “I did. Well, I wasn’t much of a speller back then.”

“Aren’t much of a speller,” Sherlock corrects him. “You haven’t improved since.”

“A little.”

“No.”

“Well, I wouldn’t misspell Afghanistan now.”

“No, but that’s contextual, not an overall improvement. You’ve seen Afghanistan written many times now, and even an idiot can learn something if it’s shoved in his face enough times. You still regularly misspell words when you leave notes to me on the refrigerator, don’t realize that you can use full stops in your blog instead of exclamation marks, and you still don’t know when to use ‘it’s’ instead of ‘its.’”

“Its instead of its?”

“Forget it,” Sherlock sighs.

“It’s funny,” John says, a small frown hovering on his lips, “that I’d misspell the name of a place that’s eventually going to kill me.”

It is funny. Or would be, if it were true. But John doesn’t think that it’s funny: he’s never really shared Sherlock’s unique sense of humour. What John means is that he thinks it’s sad, and, as much as Sherlock likes to watch John suffer, he doesn’t care to wallow in this mawkish self-pity with him any longer. Convincing John that he has a fatal illness is a necessary part of the plan, but Sherlock had been reading up on the stages of grief, and he wished he could skip over some of the more tedious ones—denial (boring, but at least it seemed like they’d done that yesterday), self-pity (boring)—to get to the good stuff.

“Yes, hilarious.”

John searches his face, trying to see if he’s making fun of him, and Sherlock is careful to keep his expression blank, and devoid of mockery.

“You need to eat,” Sherlock says.

“When did you last eat?” John counters.

Sherlock has to think about it. “Two days ago?” he says finally, and it’s more of a question that an answer. He never gets hungry or worries much about food on one of his cases, and John’s not a case, exactly, but he’s as enthralling as one. More enthralling, even, and Sherlock never thought that he’d say that about anything.

“Well, then—”

Sherlock stands up. “I’ll spare you the trouble of saying that you won’t eat unless I do.”

The look John gives him is still reproving. “Sherlock—”

“I will make two sandwiches.” Sherlock announces this as if it is a great concession, but really, it thrills him to see that, even when he thinks he is dying, John still wants to take care of him.

Making sandwiches, like almost everything in the world, is boring. The bread is growing stale, and the kitchen is almost bare. Sherlock will have to go to Mrs. Hudson tomorrow and tell her about John’s diagnosis. He’ll probably have to cry, which is boring as well, but she’ll likely agree to do the shopping after that.

John’s put the book back on the shelf and is sitting at his desk when Sherlock returns. He looks at the sandwich that Sherlock gives him almost as if he’s afraid of it. This is probably because of his stomach issues, and probably because—like so many other idiots—Sherlock’s displays of faked incompetence in the kitchen have convinced him that Sherlock, despite being a master chemist, can’t follow a simple recipe to make something eatable.

“You didn’t put chemicals in this.” It’s not a question, not quite.

“All food is made of chemicals.”

“You know what I mean.”

“There’s nothing from my experiments in the sandwich,” Sherlock says.

John takes a bite. Sherlock knows that the sandwich won’t taste very good, but it’s not terrible either.

John eats slowly, although he’s very hungry, and stops after a while, putting his hand on his stomach. Sherlock, having eaten his own food in a couple of bites, lets his eyes flicker down to this, and creases his face into lines of pain. He moves his hand up to his hair, runs it through it as though he’s trying to push away the worry, and then arranges his face into a look of unconcern.

John watches this performance in silence, but Sherlock can tell it’s having the intended effect: John looks sad, like he can’t stand that he’s causing Sherlock pain with his sickness, even if it’s not intentional.

“I have ten theories,” Sherlock says.

“Theories?”

“About your illness.”

John removes his hand from his stomach and takes another cautious bite of his sandwich. “Oh?” His tone is studiedly off-hand.

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “Your hair proved very informative. First theory: it’s a new strain of the flu. There’s an outbreak of it in Elephant and Castle, and you were there on that case with—”

“Sherlock.”

“You said yourself that it might be a new strain of the flu.”

“I know that.” John looks down at his sandwich, then up at Sherlock. He’s frowning, almost like he wants to apologize to Sherlock for getting sick. His eyes weren’t wet yet, but there’s a tightness to his features that suggests that tears might not be far off. Sherlock wants to smile at him but doesn’t. He’s trying out a new medicine on John—the custom pills that he gave him were the first dose—that should push John to experience his emotions more fully. Sherlock doesn’t ever cry unless there’s something to be gained by it. But he knows that John’s not going to be able to accept the reality of his illness until he cries about it. Like so many stupid people in the world, John thinks moisture leaking from the eyes is somehow akin to an emotional unburdening. Sherlock knows better than to think that the body and the mind are connected so facilely.

It's a pity, maybe, that they aren't. It would be nice if emotions or thoughts could unloaded so easily. The ability to remove emotions though tears makes a pretty image in Sherlock's mind, but he likes the notion of cutting thoughts out with a knife better. Sherlock smiles inwardly, imagining himself taking a knife to John's skin and lovingly cutting away everything about John (his desire for independence, his need for people other than Sherlock) that he doesn't like. How beautiful John would look as he bleed, how sweet it would be to feel the his knife slice through John's flesh: yes, it's a pity one's personality can't be changed so easily. 

Ah, well. What Sherlock can't take away from John with a knife, he'll do with his spells of words, and pills, and deceptions. He's craft John into what he wants anyway, and it will be all the more fun for all the trouble it takes him: the prize one has to work for harder is all the more precious, isn't it?

Sherlock watches John, waiting.

But John rubs a hand over his eyes, and pulls himself together. “You can continue your experiments if you want, Sherlock,” he says, “but you’re not going to find anything different than the doctors did.”

Sherlock gets up. This whole charade about his experiments and the doctors is tiresome. Even though it isn’t real, it’s still infuriating to have John doubt him like this.

“I will outside if you need me,” Sherlock says grandly.

He wants to watch John’s face fall as he sweeps out of the room, but his departure is more effective if he doesn’t.

He doesn’t slam the door, but instead smoothly closes it, the _click_ of the hinges turning with a finality that reminds Sherlock of the full stops that John so abhors in his writing: a whispered threat, firmly delivered, is almost always more effective than a shout.

He returns to the couch, this time listening intently to John’s movements. John is still for a while, and then Sherlock hears him getting up, and then the ping of John’s laptop turning on.

Sherlock smiles.

Perfect; just what he was expecting next. He’d watched John do this same thing before when a patient had come to him with an illness that John hadn’t been able to diagnose right away.

To research a question, John usually goes to the medical books that he’d used in school first, even though he had to know that they are probably out of date, and then he turns to online research.

Sherlock’s alterations to John’s computer insured that he’ll get a lot online. There is the Wikipedia article about John’s disease. Sherlock is especially proud of the poor editing and the “This entry needs work, some dead links” that he’d added at the top of the entry.

There is also the online support group. Making the discussion threads and chatter between the fictional members had been dull. There are few things more boring than creating a facsimile of the dialogue that sick people engage in. Such in depth talk of bowels really doesn’t thrill Sherlock unless the owner of the bowels is dead.

But Sherlock’s efforts seem be paying off.

From his own computer, he tracks John’s online activity, watching as he joins the support group, introducing himself by the (how imaginative! Not) screen name of “DrJ” and giving a short account of his illness. It is incredible, really, how many details even a moderately (well, compared to the idiots that most people were) savvy individual like John shares about himself online. He isn’t quite so stupid as to give out their address, but he might as well have. With the details that he provides, anyone with a grain of sense would be able to deduce it.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sherlock hadn’t made the online support group appear to be a members-only thread: Had the group been real, anyone who went online could have read it, and known not only that John was ill and vulnerable, but where he lived.

It makes Sherlock angry, even though it isn’t real. It makes John open and exposed. Sick and unable to defend himself, he would be an ideal target for someone who wanted to rob the flat, or to harm him.

(Now, that was an idea, maybe, for when Sherlock has more time.

If John is so stupid, other people would be as well. John is often a good litmus test for what an idiot would do in a given situation. Getting John sick was so much fun, but it is annoying, too, because he can’t go as far and as fast with John as he likes. Not unless he wants a repeat of the Victor Trevor situation, and he doesn’t.

But with other people, that wouldn’t be true. Other people are disposable. Sherlock won’t have to be careful, and he could test other procedures before he used them on John, to know how far he could go before the patient became unusable. It will be easy to find real support groups for sick people online, and no one will suspect anything if a group of people, with, say, incurable cancer, start dying, because that’s what people with cancer do.)

As for now, he supposes, much as he doesn’t like it, he will have to let John have his fun. No sense reprimanding him for posting on the group, when that’s what Sherlock wanted him to do in the first place.

Sherlock takes a while writing responses from the support group members, welcoming John to the forum. “David”, another solider who’d been in Afghanistan, tells John that he’ll “Get thru it, mate! Ive had it for three months now and am still hear.” Martha, an aid worker who had gotten the disease during a trip to the Middle East, welcomes John by saying “I’m so glad you’ve joined us!!! J”.

Sherlock stares at the screen. The sandwich that he’d eaten to placate John is not settling well, and his stomach feels heavy and uncomfortable. Having to write smiley faces only make it feel worse.

He closes the screen with a snap.

He’ll go visit Molly, he decides. It wasn’t like John is going anywhere in his state, and looking at corpses always settles his stomach.

 

It is Sunday evening when he gets back, and dark. John’s room is quiet.

Sherlock opens his computer, and checks what John has been up-to. John has refreshed the support group discussion thread several times, probably annoyed that no one had written anything else. He’d also found the Wikipedia article.

So far, so good, but then Sherlock opens up John’s email, and things get worse.

John has written to his sister. The beginning of the email is fine. He asks how she is and how her job is going (boring, boring, boring, and Sherlock skims this part). Then, John describes his illness and how he’d gotten sick (boring as well because John’s memory isn’t very good, and like his descriptions of Sherlock’s cases on his blog, this account of the illness is hyperbolic, inaccurate, and overly romanticized).

Then comes the bad part: John asks Harry about the spare room in her flat, and if he can come stay with her for a bit. He’d hate to be a burden, and he wouldn’t ask but he doesn’t have any other option. His pension isn’t much, but he’ll contribute what he can to the rent. He’s only asking because Harry had taken care of Mum when she was sick and helped a lot, and who else can help in these situations, but family, really?

And that’s not the worst of it:

 _Sherlock’s trying_ , John writes, _but its not his thing, and he signed up to have an assistant on his cases and not an invalid, and its just not fair to him._

It’s, not its, moron. How many times he have to tell John this?

Sherlock reads this sentence three times, getting angrier each time he reads it. It goes beyond mere idiocy, what John had written. Perhaps the medicine is making him insane. Why else would he think that taking care of John was, as he so inelegantly put it, _not Sherlock’s thing_? Sherlock has done an exemplary job taking care of John. He sees that he eats, drinks, and takes his medicine. He watches him when he sleeps, and monitors him for signs of illness. He knows how to make John sicker and how to make him well again.

Harry, stupid, incompetent, lazy Harry has no such record. Oh, sure, she’d taken care of John’s mother in her last illness, but what of that? John’s mother is dead. She is hardly an advertisement for Harry’s nursing skills.

And what is not about it not being “fair” to Sherlock? John knows nothing about what is fair or not. Sherlock has always treated John fairly. What John is proposing—leaving Sherlock for his alcoholic sister—is the height of unfairness.

Sherlock will have to show John just how wrong he is about this.

But how?

It’s a measure of Sherlock’s angry that it’s a whole minute—An agony of time! An eternity!—before the plan of how he will keep John with him comes to him.

But when it does, Sherlock smiles so broadly that his face almost hurts from it. He knows actually what to do, and it’s perfect, absolutely so.

After this, he decides, sitting up and preparing to go to John’s room, John will not try to get help from Harry or Lestrade or Mike or anyone, because John will be completely his. 


End file.
